In the first century before the Earthgate War, the galaxy was becoming very small, as jumpgate networks grew exponentially, linking the Homeworlds and their colonies ever more tightly. Massive wars flared up often, usually over ideological differences, and so it became wise for those seeking to practice activities which rival powers might consider unethical to do so far, far away from their line of sight.

And so the extreme edge of explored space became prime real estate, especially for the Core Industry corporation of the NTC, whose long near-monopolistic advantage in their field was due to a long legacy of "slave labor", the practice of employing genetically-engineered workers, groomed for maximum endurance and docility, locked into payment arrangements that made them virtually serfs. The practice--legal under NTC law--was tolerated by their trade partners (most importantly Karma and the Union Navy) as an unfortunate necessity, but in the last century before Earthgate, the relative power of Karma and its allies had grown too great for the NTC to resist. The practice was banned on Union worlds, with a sunset clause preventing indefinite grandfathering by the seemingly immortal corporations such as Core.

And so, the frontier was harnessed as a new base of industry. The Union, such as it was, was an interstellar alliance and trade consortium, whose member worlds voted to join and maintain duties within. It had no provision to automatically expand to any worlds its member governments' citizens colonized. Had an NTC corporation established a colony in the frontier and applied for standing as a corporate steading, then they would have been bound by NTC and thus Union law--but Core opted not to bother. Their operation was an independent spinoff, unprotected by the NTC, ostensibly a series of independent colonies, despite ultimately being controlled by a single corporation. The arrangement was legal, and--seemingly--safe, due to tendency of imperial wars rarely extending beyond the core worlds.

Over decades, Core Industry shifted a large portion of their base (read: factories and near-slave laborers) to the frontier colonies, allowing them to maintain competitive edge as their home factories reconfigured to adapt to the new laws. They reasoned that even if the factories spun off independently--as they could easily do, without NTC law to back up Core's claim--there would be a point at which they were unnecessary, and vast as they were, they were pitiful compared to the home industrial base, so they wouldn't be a credible threat...especially without the mother corporation's vast transport armada to ferry their goods home.

Nowhere in the original plan was there a consideration for the possibility of alien invasion, and the destruction of the jumpgate network. The Earthgate War severed the frontier colonies' link to the core worlds, and even when that link was more or less repaired 50 years later, the new reality of interstellar travel meant that such far-flung factories could never be economically feasible. And so, as Terra Draconis was ravaged by Earthgate drones, its far-flung outposts had an unexpected opportunity, coupled with an immediate and vast need for resources.

Millions of laborers had been relocated to the factories, which were not designed to be self-sufficient (an additional safeguard against any thoughts of splintering into a competing corporation). With the supply ships suddenly cut off, a massive humanitarian disaster ensued. In the early days, information was scarce; they knew only that the supplies had dried up, and had no idea why. In fact, years passed before they learned precisely what had caused it, and the damage was long since done.

When the supplies vanished, the seemingly obvious reason was that the corporation was exercising its trump card. Despite the docility of the working population, they were still human, and subject to human whim and motives, and not every worker could be recruited from such stock--there were plenty enough unmodified (or even enhanced) humans, an elite caste of skilled and highly educated workers. Often enough, they had stoked the masses into a fervor over this or that labor concern, and the upper management, when pushed far enough, would threaten to cut them off from supplies. It wasn't an overt threat, and their propaganda ensured that the masses didn't believe it possible, but the elites knew, and it limited their options substantially.

When the trump card was finally played, it seemed, there was nothing left to lose, and the elites mobilized a massive uprising, toppling the executives and seizing control of the industrial operations and declaring themselves independent corporations. Seizure of corporate assets assuaged hunger and imminent need only briefly, however--with no new supply ships, millions were doomed. Unless, of course, they were to find supplies elsewhere.

The colonies in which the factories were based were small, but not negligible. The presence of so many workers led to a market for goods and services. Although most of such were provided by the company, from company stores, they had to be produced somewhere, and so the colonies, ostensibly independent governments with reasonably open trade agreements and immigration policies, had accumulated some small population. With a few million laborers in need of basic necessities, the colonial settlements quickly became targets.

The epicenter of the formation of the precursor to the Syndicate was on the planet Trent. With a population of just under a hundred thousand, the colonists were badly outnumbered by the six hundred thousand workers of Trent Heavy Fabrication, ltd. Still, it wasn't as if the spacebound factories had a handy invasion fleet capable of carrying so many people, so there was room for political maneuvering. Early leaders of the THF Worker's Union landed on Trent and negotiated a deal--the colonists would keep the workers in supply, and in turn, they wouldn't get invaded just yet.

The supplies of Trent were greatly overstrained, and tensions rose as it proved unwieldy to ration so many workers, especially as they grew bored--many were out of work as vital hardware shipments had ceased, leading more and more of the operation to become nonfunctional. They needed to expand beyond Trent, and quickly.

Using the erstwhile Worker's Fleet, cobbled together out of freighters and tugs, the union leaders seized the jumpgate to the nearby hub world of Porter's Star. Uncertain why it had stopped functioning in the first place, they managed to reenable it after some frantic and heroic engineering efforts, relinking them to the hub that should link them all the way back to the NTC.

But on the other side of the gate, they found that others had had similar ideas--and there were a great many liberated workers contesting far too few resources.

• Year 0: Earthgate War. All hell breaks loose. Colonies cut off from supplies. Workers overthrow executives, first priority is meeting basic needs. Early labor unions seize colonial assets, local group merges to form the Worker's Alliance, a commune designed to keep them all alive, and puts their resources toward building a fleet to protect them from the inevitable NTC counterattack.
• Year 3: After a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions springing from resource shortages and differences in ideology, control of the industry and fleet coalesces under the Hillman Syndicate, an elite cadre of labor organizers and revolutionary leaders wielding anarcho-syndicalist propaganda alongside traditional empire-building tools. They have overseen the construction of new jumpgates and jump carriers, and their territory has expanded hungrily to feed the masses. Their "government" encounters the Foundation, who accuses them of piracy and orders them to dissolve or face invasion.