The waning months of 4641 were marked by an eerie stillness. It had taken nearly three years for the Arthenean crews to locate the technology of the Leghk. The effort had been enormously expensive in lives and equipment, but it had finally been successful in the May of that year. Now the citizens of Arth scrambled to outfit their defenses before the wily Spemin could summon the courage to attack. The nervous tension was everywhere, but it was balanced by the anticipation of a dawning era.

Two decades earlier, Humanity had returned to the stars. On a wave of desperation and hope, the Artheneans had reached out to save themselves from destruction by a hidden force of awesome proportions. The elimination of the crystal planet was both a blessing and a curse. The flaring stars were halted, but Endurium was ripped away as a fuel source, and the renaissance ground to a halt.

The Leghk Crusade led the Artheneans along the trade routes of the cloud nebula and ultimately to the source of shyneum, a new fuel to power the Human rebirth. Once again, the citizens of Arth could look skyward and dream of a golden age among the stars.

The stars were still a dangerous place. The Uhlek, “Uhl’s Leghk,” groped blindly, still unpredictable, at the outward edge of the Earth region. An eternity of servitude had left them confused and dangerous, trying to regain a sense of themselves. Their weapons were still deadly. The Thrynn and Elowan carried out their ancient feud, the Thrynn pushing the Elowan, in fits and starts, toward extinction. Even the generally reclusive Gazurtoid were growing restless, lashing out with the randomness of their insanity. Beyond all this, the new races of the Leghk region were slowly beginning to come into contact with those of the Earth region. Sorting things out would take some time and the potential for conflict hung in the cosmos.

But you’ve still got to make a buck. So Biggs Hilsfar took his ship, the ISS Belfast Windfall, on a paid cruise to the Dead Zone to poke around the ruins of the Old Empire. The Elowan were putting up some good money and Biggs had bills to pay. He assembled his crew, a bunch of young kids, really, and hit the road. This is their story: