Prayer Drive

The year is New Calendar 2999, over ten thousand years into the future. Human civilization has expanded from earth and now inhabits a vast area strung around the circumference of the milky way galaxy. For over three millennia, a single government, the Unity, has maintained human space, ensuring internal peace, and without external challenge. Too many, it seems the third millennia promises a continuation of the seemingly never ending and almost unchanging golden age of human-kind.

Others however see something else: that over the long term, the only constant is change.

Politics

The vast expanse of human space is ruled by a single government, the Unity, who's officers are responsible for maintaining the laws of justice and codes of conduct which bind human space together. The Unity maintains the vast trade fleets and interstellar gateways which allow even the farthest flung reaches of human habitation enjoy luxuries drawn from all across the galaxy. It's fleets maintain order and prevent atrocities by local governments and the development of violent separatist movements and other terrorist elements.

While a few grumble about the Unity's prerogative to override local leadership if its officers deem it necessary, there has been little serious military opposition to the Unit since the Sagittarius War a fifty years ago, when the SALDAC organization (Sagittarian Alliance for Liberation, Democracy, Autonomy and Cooperation) openly rebelled against the Unity. The fighting saw widespread destruction around the galaxy, the deployment of illegal memetic weapons by the League, and the subversion of several major Unity Expert Systems, causing more havoc and destruction.

Since then, life for humanity has been relatively quiet, and concentrated on trade and economic growth, not disruptive change to the political order.

Technology

While most vessels possess an individual jump drive, these are too slow for anything but local travel. Instead most trade and commerce flows through the great Unity gate network, a vast array of structures which allow instant travel between them. Originally the creation of some long forgotten alien race, the Unity's mastery of the technology to build gateways is one of the primary forces behind its dominance of the modern era.

The second pillar of the Unity's dominance is it's control over so called Expert Systems, specialized AIs of incredible processing power. These Expert Systems guide humanity in numerous respects, preventing economic crises, perfecting new drugs and medical treatments and managing important galactic infrastructure such as communications and traffic flow.

Human augmentation of various kinds is a fairly common technology, but most humans have not been become transhuman beings in the way some might have envisioned. Rather, humans of 2999 are stronger, faster, more intelligent and generally better looking than their counterparts of previous ages. Artificial life including androids and bioroids are extensively used, as are freestanding AIs, though most of these are so alien as to be impossible for a normal human to grasp. The most advanced of these are the Unity's Expert systems, built throughout the galaxy and controlled from the vast central processing citadel at Thoth.

A second avenue of human advancement is the PRAYER system. Users of PRAYER use augmentations or special training to access other information and power sources from other universes and dimensions, allowing them to access vast power and sometimes even bend physics to their whim within a defined zone. The powers and mystique of PRAYER users has come to fascinate many members of the public, and they make up an elite group within many governments, armed forces and corporations.

Both ships and people protect themselves with energy fields, usually mounted in a small broach for people and use energy weapons and missiles as weapons. Infantry combat has changed relatively little over the years, though in space, most groups deployed agile combat frames in support of star ships. Long range sensors are unreliable due to modern ECM, which hampers all but visual targeting, its self hampered by use of thermoptic cloaks, metamaterials and other shroud technology allowing for small fighters and combat frames to close rapidly, without having too much to worry about from guided weapons.

Aliens

Humanity has encountered over a hundred separate alien species, and found them all to be largely incomprehensible and often uninterested in humanity. Earlier predictions about the dominance of oxygen breathing life with similar biochemistry to earth have been proven completely false, and sentient aliens vary completely from humanity in size, biochemistry and the like. Given the size of the galaxy and the different environmental niches of humans and aliens there has been no conflict over territory, and on some planets humans and aliens even live side by side, ignoring one another (for instance, human cities on land and aliens living in the deep layers of a planetary ocean).

Alien artefacts and vessels are protected from interference by Unity law, though this is as much for the protection of humans as aliens, as some species will strike back hard if provoked. There is limited trade with some alien species, mostly in the form of the exchange of novel mathematically formulas and information on natural sciences.

Situation

The Unity's Fifth Exploratory Fleet, augmented by various elements from research corporations and universities, has been dispatched coreward down the Sagittarius Arm to inspect a star in that area, designated Sif AB-91. Sif AB-91 was up until recently an unremarkable main sequence star. Now however it appears to be collapsing with alarming speed and unknown reason. Fifth Exploration Fleet has been deployed to investigate the precise reason for this collapse, and investigate whether it could propose a security risk to inhabited world.