Overview

In 2088, mankind left Earth for the stars.

Five colony ships set out for Alpha Centauri, carrying fifty thousand humans to humanity's newest homeworld.

They never made it.

Three ships found themselves over 60,000 light years from Earth, each far from its sister ships, with only one chance at survival: find a nearby planet and preserve the human race.

A hundred years passed before they made contact with each other.

There was peace at first, then, inevitably, war. All three homeworlds survived these growing pains of civilization, and most of the splinter factions who had colonized other worlds since.

A hundred and fifty more years passed before they reestablished contact with Earth.

They'd found the fourth ship.

The fourth ship didn't make it.

But it's computer did, and it was the only one of the four which retained its ability to contact Earth.

Earth informed them to build a gate, using technology they didn't understand, but could painstakingly reproduce.

When the gate was finished, the invasion began.

The Homeworlds ran gray with an army of a billion drone ships, swarming through their space like a mindless ooze with laser cannons.

The stunned scientists who'd built the gate couldn't stop them.

The fleets of the three Homeworlds couldn't stop them.

Only an Allied Fleet, comprised of the survivors of every Homeworld, managed to turn the tide.

The war ended only 64 days after it began, when the Allied Fleet destroyed the Earthgate star, destroying the gate for which the system was named, and the factory which kept the drone fleet growing.

That was 60 years ago.

I wish I could say we all lived happily ever after.

But men are men, and politics is politics. The Homeworlds did not stay one people for long. The old empires are still there, and the old rivalries still remain.

But there is hope. The survivors of the Allied Fleet built a space station, the first of many. It was to be a neutral ground for all the Homeworlds, and the headquarters for a sustained Allied Fleet, forever defending the Homeworlds from alien aggression.

When the Unification never occurred, those people instead formed their own nation, the Homeworlds Foundation. Their citizens were from all worlds, and all walks of life. To a person, every Foundation citizen is a volunteer, serving the Foundation by choice. All uphold the principles of the Foundation: to keep the peace, to defend against alien invasion, and to preserve civilization throughout the Homeworlds.

It is the year 2408. The Homeworlds spans hundreds of star systems. Over 31 billion people live in those systems, more of them than not on the original three Homeworlds and the earliest colonies.

That leaves hundreds of worlds for those who have no taste for the comforts of civilization, or those for whom civilization itself has no taste. In the vast, untold darkness between the points of light in the Homeworlds, there exists a thriving underworld of pirates, smugglers, thieves, and lowlives, who make the goal of peace and civilization seem so much more distant for those who oppose them.

We've given up on Earth. It's dead to us.

The Homeworlds are life. They are civilization. They are the home of the human race, and the other sentient races into which humanity is evolving. They will be the base from which mankind settles the galaxy.

And if those Earth drones show up again, they will die again, no matter how many stars it takes.