Introduction

   Despite all appearances to the contrary, Earth had managed to not destroy itself.  Carelessness and abject stupidity had done damage that took huge effort to undo, but in the end, Humanity’s home had thrived and populated the stars…

   Humanity had spread into the Solar System and met a wall, even at a large percent of lightspeed the stars were out of reach and the power to get to lightspeed simply could not be put into ships, or anything else.  Mass was the limiting problem and simply would not go away.  It took the activities of an eccentric scientist/engineer to provide the solution, the serious bending of physical laws, a proposal that had earned him such scorn that he had renamed himself Nicko Asimov.  Ultra-Light, or UL, was born which simply stepped around the idea of increasing to and past lightspeed.  At a significant percentage of lightspeed, or LS, the new drive simply ignored it and blew the ship around it and into multiples of it and humanity reached out in a flood.

   Twelve hundred years of colonization and advancement ensued and to its astonishment, humanity found itself alone as a sentient species and artificial intelligence research found it could do no more than pantomime actual sentience with programing.  It was, essentially, ignored as wasted effort for something either impossible or potentially exceedingly dangerous.

   Despite the adoption of a common language, sometimes called English or American, cultures held onto their differences.  The bloody competitions between them had ceased but people were still tied together by their common experiences and much of the diaspora involved colony ships from single cultural backgrounds.  More than culture called them together onto ships, many also were populated by people with similar interests despite culture differences and quite a few were seeming hodgepodges of whoever happened to be going.  It had been noted across the millennia that people are strange, apparently some things don’t change.

   Oddly enough, despite being an offense to the technical and scientific communities, or perhaps because it was, the so-called Imperial system stubbornly refused to die and in fact became de facto common usage.  One factor was that even the simplest computer didn’t care about units, provided they had an established value, and decimal points, and factors were just as useful as words.  Another was that one particularly influential previous nation was just ridiculously attached to it.   The result of all that mixing created a Galaxy with a common currency, understandable dialects, and a multitude of cultures, not all of them peaceful. 

One thing the galaxy held in common with Earth was that resources and tastes were not evenly distributed and so trade was the largest single type of business, and some were particularly good at it.  Twelve hundred years after the discovery of UL events showed that…well, there is a story.

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