Anachron

Prologue

A long time ago, mankind was trapped in its own little star system.  The problem was a little thing called the speed of light.  You see, you can't travel faster than the speed of light.  On a planetary scale, that isn't much of a restriction, but the galaxy is a very big place.  So big that even if you could travel at the absolute speed limit of the universe, it would take decades just to go next door, centuries to get to more than a few nearby stars, and hundreds of thousands of years to get to the other side.

All that changed with the development of wormholes.  Suddenly, we could open a gateway and travel light-years in just a few minutes.  It was a new era of exploration.  It didn't happen overnight, though.  A ship would go through a wormhole, and begin construction of a station on the other side.

Humanity expanded, building an empire a hundred light years across.  At about this time, outlying worlds, far from the influence of the central government, began to be taken over by greedy, unscrupulous forces.   It was decided that a military would be formed to police the many worlds.  This was the origin of the Terran Space Forces, or TSF.

Order was restored, but only for a time.  After another wave of expansion, we encountered a vicious, agressive race known as the Markadians.  Lead by a powerful leader known as Rejjik the Conqueror, they waged war against humanity.  Capturing our outposts, they were able to expand into our territory faster than we had been able to build it in the first place.

The TSF increased production of ships of all sizes, from small two-to-three man 'fighters' all the way up to huge battleships with crews numbering in the thousands.  It never seemed like enough.  Rejjik was a tactical genius, able to outmanoeuvre the finest tactical minds that humanity had to offer.

It seemed like humanity was doomed.