by Chris Ward
Cable – second inhabited planet; cities include Seen (capital), Tantol (minor oceanside spaceport, containing the scum district known as the Tuft), and Parlow (remote polar town and site of the Records Depository).
Abalon 3 – fire planet and desert world; cities include Avar (largest spaceport) and Boxar (second largest spaceport).
Barlales – inhabited planet; cities include Court.
Forsten One – planet
Timbus-2 – fire planet, often the location of a Trill System Starfleet navy.
Jol – uninhabited outlying moon
Other Named Systems and Planets
Trident System
Balthasar Sol – inhabitable planet; native home of the Nehicans, a horse-like race.
Yool-4 System
Originating system of the Barelaon Helix.
Festar System
Home system of the Gorms.
Glossary of Races
Barelaon
Originally an antagonistic and feudal species originating from an unknown system, it is also a blanket term given to bands of for-hire mercenaries made up from members of other races either outcast or leaving by choice. Often adapted by their teams for warfare, they are usually at least partially robotic.
Farsi
A human subspecies that closely resemble their parent species in terms of physiology, with the exception of having overlarge facial features and somewhat greater strength.
Human-Minion
A former human sub-species created long ago in a laboratory by fusing human genetics with those of the common domestic cat. Small and irascible, they tend to be destructive by nature.
Karpali
Six armed, and as a result very popular as manual laborers. Highly skilled Karpali are often employed in shipyards and other industrial sectors because of their working speed.
Rue-Tik-Tan
A lizard-based species, scaly, tall, spine-backed. Lacking many of the emotions humans consider standard, they are often found involved in slavery or other nefarious practices. Often derogatively labeled “space hedgehogs” due to their distinctive spines.
Tolgier
A human subspecies with similar features to their parent species, but larger, more muscular, and hairier.
Abaloni
One of the most ancient human subspecies, they are roughly sixty percent machine, an adaption that allows them to fold up into an sealed oval in order to protect themselves from the powerful firestorms that their planet’s atmosphere suffers from. While by their nature they are home-loving and simple people, rarely leaving their home planet, their technology has been made available for adaption by peoples on other fire planets.
Evattlan
An insect-like species with powerful body armour but low intelligence, often recruited as foot soldiers. They are roughly half autonomous, half-controlled by a hive mind, which can overrule their own instincts. Excessive breeding on their home world of Vattla in Frail System has created hundreds of off-world moon and asteroid communities living in synthetic conditions, while the excess of their huge litters are often carbon-frozen and sold into slavery as expendable foot soldiers. Their limited self-autonomy means they don’t fall under most galactic restrictions on slavery.
Grun
An ancient race involved in inter-system mining trade.
Hispirians
Formed from the organic fusing of thousands of intelligent snakes and known as one of the galaxy’s deadliest form of assassin.
Gorm
Jellified but highly intelligent creatures with possible mindreading capabilities, they are only able to move by the use of motorised carts, and often the employ of subservient species. Originating from the Festar System.
Kalistini
Resemble humans despite not being a subspecies, they are around seven feet tall, spindly and bony.
Lork
Hairy, muscular human subspecies.
Luminosi
Human subspecies which have evolved near-transparent bodies which can pulse illuminating colours to represent emotions, or to frighten enemies or attract mates.
Oufolani
A caterpillar-like species.
Shadowmen
A “human-language” name given to a towering, spindly race, whose own name is unpronounceable by the human larynx. Tall and terrifying for human and human-subspecies due to some evolutionary feeling of horror, they are roughly nine Earth-feet tall yet half the weight of an average human, giving them the appearance of moving shadows.
Glossary of Spacecraft
Diamond Bulkhead X3 – nine mile long interplanetary freighter
Dirt Devils – small planetary fighter ships, circular, fast but with limited body armor.
Enforcers – newer city police craft, faster and sleeker than older Peacekeepers.
GMP deep-space outpost – a galactic “police box”, these are small (by space station standards) stations orbiting in deep space to keep order in the outer system.
Lighthouse 34-K Deep-Space Trading Outpost – a space station placed deep in a system with the primary aim of providing a trading and rest stop for space travelers.
Matilda – Lia’s ship, a Pioneer-Class XL Rogue Hunter Assault Craft, which resembles a spider on landing and taking off, while reverting to a more elongated shape for longer journeys. Designed for close contact space battles.
Thatcher-9 Deep Space Observatory – research vessel from Old-Earth originally dispatched during the Second Expansion
Type-9 Interceptor – GMP fighter craft, slow but heavily armed, designed for boarding smuggler space barges and hostile starships.
Glossary of Terminology
Off-Worlder
A blanket term used by most species to describe all species with origins from a different planet or star system. A local on one planet becomes an off-worlder on another.
Human subspecies
As humans explored the galaxy and colonised other star systems, they seemingly had two main goals: annihilation and reproduction, and anything that didn’t adhere to the first usually adhered to the second. Therefore, over millennia, numerous subspecies of human have developed through interbreeding with other races, genetic development and gene manipulation, or biotechnological engineering. Some are nearly identical, others vastly different. According to current galactic law, a subspecies can consider itself a unique species (and therefore be able to create its own rules and regulations) when it is no longer able to breed with pureblood humans. So far, roughly thirty former subspecies have been identified thus.
Expansions
A significant wave of space exploration that occurred some time in the past is known as an Expansion. Each wave is usually identified as a great departure of new deep-space exploration craft or the discovery of two or more previously-unknown inhabited systems within a relatively short space of time. Sometimes, when a series of linked systems are discovered, the period becomes known as a Great Expansion.
Stasis-Ultraspace
Ships travel from galaxy to galaxy (or from one part of a system to another) through artificially created wormholes, the coordinates of which are either stored in a ship’s database or accessible by picking up planetary broadcast transmissions. Stasis-ultraspace is the name given to the condensed space distance travelled during such a wormhole leap. This is the only practical way for spacecraft to move from system to system. Ships with a stasis-ultraspace-capable drive go nowhere in actual distance, but the energy used for each jump is immense, meaning that only bigger craft are able to carry the fuel needed to do repeated jumps without refueling. In addition, while the time taken for the jump is instantaneous, on busy routes a time given for a jump would be the time that ship remained queued behind other craft using the same route. In addition, the location of a wormhole remains static, so that they drift away from planets during orbits, often requiring lengthy inter-system travel to reach a convenient one.
Routes are fixed, but new routes are constantly being created by deep-space explorat
ion ships—some manned, some not—that travel to distant, unexplored systems using lightspeed-based methods. For this reason, new systems are only added to the known galaxy every fifty or sixty Earth-years, and often access to such systems is severely restricted to prevent clashes with potentially hostile natives.
The Intergalactic Code of Communications
A rough framework of rules governing the conduct of spacecraft and space stations in deep space. Such rules including the non-refusal of docking for repairs of a ship offering a peace flag, or the honourary aiding without rebuttal to marooned ships. Like most sets of rules, its exact meaning is disputed in many systems, and rarely followed in the full. Openly breaking it, however, is a criminal offence, and the crew of any convicted vessel can be punished according to the rules of the capturing system’s government … if caught.
Thank you for your interest in my work.
Please join my READERS GROUP to get exclusive news, offers, and special discounts.
Readers Group - click here to join
You can also chat to me on Facebook at
Chris Ward (Fiction Writer)
and follow progress on new books on my website at
www.amillionmilesfromanywhere.net
Thank you for reading!
