When a Samaritan as he traveled came upon the stricken man who had fallen among robbers he was moved with compassion. The Samaritan came to him, and cleansed his wounds with oil and wine. He set the man upon his donkey and carried him to the safety of an inn.
-The Parable of the Good Samaritan
Untold ages ago, we witnessed the gods create fire through lightning and brush, and from then on we thought of little else but stealing it for ourselves. Through peace and war we discovered the engines of steam and combustion, of automobiles and aircraft and then rockets capable of carrying three men to our nearest neighbor: the Moon. Ionic and electromagnetic propulsion followed. Though slow, these engines burned steady and carried us to the red planet we named for the god of the wars that spurred our expansion.
Then we expanded farther to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and we discovered the keys great minds pondered and lusted after. Matter with the exotic properties required to hoist the Alcubierre designs for faster-than-light travel from the ideas of geniuses to the forges of the governments of America, India, and China. A new space race began, and within a quarter century, the speed of light and the petty differences between the two greatest world powers that Earth had ever known became distant memories. Humanity embarked on the greatest exploratory struggle they had ever undertaken as a species: the journey to another star.
Less than a decade after we discovered the secret to interstellar travel, we also discovered that our journey was not at all unique. The stars were jealously guarded, and we learned to our regret that those xenos established among them had little regard for human life and even less respect for the territory humans claimed.
But in the ashes these aliens made of our first interstellar pioneers, the raiders from the stars left a gift of untold value: a tear in the fabric of space near the core of the system. A second way around the threshold of light speed, a mystery of physics so utterly alien to human minds that the discovery of the horizon drive shattered our understanding of the natural world. And like fire before it, humanity could think of little else until it was ours.
As the astronauts of Earth flung themselves ever farther across their corner of the Orion Spur, that narrow bridge between the Perseus and Sagittarius arms of the Milky Way, it became clear that we could not survive Earth’s discovery. So the Union Earth government elected to withdraw, to colonize planets in secret or cohabitate with other xenos as desperate as we. Until fleets from Earth could stand against the threat of interstellar war, humans would be as ghosts in the darkness between stars. To reach that day, to close that critical technological gap we needed a new method of advancement.
The Union Earth Privateers were founded five decades after the first Alcubierre module pushed itself past light speed on a torus of compressed space. Granted almost unilateral authority, the Privateers had a single directive: Gather advanced technology from every corner of reachable space. Some forged diplomatic bonds, others turned to salvage or piracy. Some became rescuers in an uncaring galaxy, trading safe passage for scraps of xenotech. Through the tireless work and sacrifice of the Privateers, humans began creeping ever closer toward the day when they could stand among the other races in the stars.