The Cluster 

Humanity reached the stars by running away.

Roughly a billion people fled Old Earth aboard a colony flotilla. It didn’t take long for them to start killing one another.

Then came the Scattering. The flotilla was torn apart and dispersed across the galaxy. Most crews died. The survivors rebuilt in isolation, usually badly, and sometimes cruelly.

Centuries later, the Erudite Directorate became the first civilisation to access Corridor Space through the Pillars. It reconnected scattered worlds and began deciding how humanity ought to be saved.

The Venti Republic objected, because nobody likes another power controlling the roads.

Then the Lunar Union arrived right in the middle of a skirmish, and first contact became an eight-month war. The shooting ended with the Passoma Accords. The espionage, proxy wars, and sponsored violence continued.

Now the Fourth Pillar has opened the (FRONTIER) : a vast region of habitable systems, uncontacted peoples, ruins, colonies, and claims nobody can enforce. Every government, corporation, religion, and hopeful idiot wants a piece.

That is where Armournauts come in.

We escort ships, protect colonies, recover ruins, suppress rebellions, and start wars our employers later call misunderstandings.

The Directorate promises progress. The Republic promises prosperity. The Union promises parity.

The Cluster

Far from ruined Old Earth, the Cluster is a network of inhabited worlds and orbital communities linked by Corridor Space and the possibly alien megastructures known as the Pillars. Its peoples were shaped by centuries of isolation before interstellar contact resumed.

It is commonly divided into six macro-regions: the Temple Sphere, Lunar Union Territories, Venti Space, the Core, the Jambles, and the Frontier. The first three are dominated by the Superpowers; the others remain divided among states, corporations, factions, and independent movements.

In common use, the Cluster means every known human world reachable through the Corridors. More may exist beyond the mapped routes, still isolated and waiting to be found. Or subjugated.

Armournauts

That’s you.

Armournauts are heavily armed professionals for hire, working across conflict zones for governments, corporations, factions, and private clients. Their contracts can shift the balance between nations, and a single decision may determine whether a dispute ends in negotiation or war.

An Armournaut survives through equipment, judgement, and the people fighting beside them.

The Pillars

The Pillars are alien megastructures measured in light-years. They appear to create or interact with Corridor Space, making faster-than-light travel, and therefore the Cluster itself, possible.

Four are known. Two lie in Directorate space and another in Lunar Union territory, though none can truly be controlled. The Fourth Pillar is officially in the Frontier, but the Union will happily annex it when the Venti aren’t watching.

The scale of the Pillars, distorted spacetime, and time dilation make direct study nearly impossible, and every attempt to land on one has failed.

Most useful knowledge comes from Pillarite, material shed into surrounding debris fields. Samples are rumoured to display impossible properties, including teleportation, regeneration, and perpetual motion. These are rumours, to be clear. Logging them for posterity. Personally, these all sound like nonsense.

Nobody knows who built the Pillars, why, or whether they were even built rather than occurring naturally.

Things that large should not be able to hide. Until recently, one did.

The Frontier

The Fourth Pillar opened routes into the Frontier: a vast, unstable region dense with habitable systems and larger than the Core.

For eighty-four years, the Superpowers have failed to control it. Now they are trying harder. Colonists, corporations, minor states, religious movements, and Armournauts are all competing for worlds, routes, and resources.

Some believe the Corridor network continues indefinitely. Others expect to find more isolated human societies beyond it.

Either way, the Frontier will decide the future of the Cluster. Judging by how things started, I don’t see it ending well.

Old Earth

Old Earth is abandoned and lost to humanity. The people of the Cluster descend from roughly a billion survivors who fled the Sol system aboard a flotilla bound for Proxima B.

Why they left is uncertain. Climate collapse, resource wars, engineered life, artificial intelligence, and planetary conflict are all blamed, but much of the evidence was lost in the Scattering. The scale of the exodus suggests there is more to the story.

No known Corridor leads back to Sol, and a sublight voyage would take an absurd length of time. Even so, private expeditions and religious movements still dream of returning.

Maybe the people who stayed rebuilt. Maybe they died. Either way, Earth is history now.

The Superpowers

Humanity’s future is contested by three Superpowers: the Erudite Directorate, the Venti Republic, and the Lunar Union.

Each claims a guiding ideal.

Progress. Prosperity. Parity.

I’ve worked for all three, which qualifies me to dislike them professionally. They could solve much of the Cluster’s misery if they stopped trying to dominate one another long enough to try.

The Erudite Directorate

Also known as the Temple, the Erudite discovered the Pillars, faster-than-light travel, simulated realities, and enough other miracles to have saved humanity several times over.

What they did with that knowledge was subjugate the Vakil, build a society around the Great Work, and teach generations of citizens to mistake usefulness for purpose.

I lived there. It made me feel less like a person than material being processed into the correct shape.

The Lunar Union

The Union has good reasons for being afraid.

Its people survived slavers, drone barons, death cults, and finally the Lha’Maggeans, who nearly erased them through biological, chemical, radiological, and atomic war. That kind of history can justify almost anything if you let it.

The Union promises parity, then preserves it through control, suspicion and force.

The Venti Republic

The Republic has the best stories.

Heroes, uniforms, charges, duels, tyrants overthrown at the last moment. Exactly the sort of history people use to excuse every ugly institution that survived alongside the nice coat.

The Venti turned Armournauts into an industry, exported us across the Cluster, and then acted surprised when hired guns began shaping nations.

The Venti have a saying “Prosperity has a price”. The mask clearly slips from time to time, but it sure is a pretty mask.

Cold War

The Superpowers are not formally at war. Their proxies, allies, and mercenaries have been fighting for centuries.

Most of that violence has centred on the Jambles, where revolutions, civil wars, and sponsored insurgencies are common enough to become background noise. The Fourth Pillar shifted attention outward, easing pressure on the Jambles while the Frontier militarised in its place.

The three powers still trade, sit together on the Cluster Defence Council, and share authority through the Interplanetary Nations Coalition.

They are allies on paper, but look sharp. Armournauts don’t work for free,  political tension pays well.