‘Excuse me,’ I murmured, sidling over to the big chair despite First Officer Murray’s look of annoyance (the big galoot had been trying to keep me away all afternoon, saying I was ‘too drunk’ to be on the bridge), ‘but I’ve done this before. I reckon I can sort it out.’ The Captain shot me a look of assent, and before Murray could block me, I took the microphone and looked up at the Olang on the screen.
‘Because, you orange git,’ I said, gnashing the words with relish, ‘Captain Aquitaine has three stealthed attack craft just astern of your vessel. What do you think of that, eh?’
The situation was solved. Captain Aquitaine put her palm to her face in relief, and the Olang offered her the tight-lipped expression and raised eyebrow which I’m fairly sure is a gesture of submission in their culture. I don’t know why I ever gave up this diplomacy lark, I’m amazing at it.
— FROM THE TRAVEL JOURNAL OF FLOYD WATT
4 Investigate a mysterious distress signal
Despite the relative safety of travel among the stars, there’s still no accounting for accidents, stupidity and hubris: switch on even so basic a device as a radio in open sky and you’ll receive hundreds of pings from crash sites, derelicts, imperilled colonies and mysterious ancient artefacts. Pretty much any of these can make for a fantastic day out, although admittedly sometimes that will involve an ambush from SPACE Pirates or an encounter with a nest of writhing Xenads.[5]
Region by Region
The star systems of SPACE hold far too many planets, moons and structures to detail individually. Even the interstellar empires are too numerous to outline here, with more than thirty civilisations having ten or more systems to their name. Nevertheless, there are some broad regions worth identifying to the prospective astronaut.
1 Outpost Bravo
Our main access point to SPACE is via the gargantuan, leaky station at its centre, known as Outpost Bravo, which has become a hub for travel throughout the entire region. Bravo is the home and workplace of the hapless Space Men[6] (see People, below), but given its location, it’s also a popular neutral ground for trade and negotiation, and virtually every species and government in SPACE has an expat community here. The Space Men are a bit stressed out by all this happening on their turf while they’re trying to do their Missions[7], but they stay sane so long as the civilian population keeps mostly to its assigned districts.
2 The Pulp Nebula
Not far from Outpost Bravo sprawls a huge, pink-tinged nebula – one of the regions where SPACE’s ultra-thin atmosphere gathers into a pocket of breathable air – with a dozen or so moons concealed in its depths, all orbiting the enormous gas giant Grum. This Pulp Nebula (so-called for its resemblance to a giant, burst-open fruit) is home to an astonishing ecosystem, where thick, warm air has allowed life to flourish in the expanse between worlds. Asteroids on which drifting seeds have taken root have become floating, forested mountains, while gigantic Astrocetaceans and jungled-over derelicts drift together through flamingo-coloured skies. It’s a wild place, and the moons within it are hotbeds of savage adventure populated by Barbarians, Lizardmen and more.
3 Syndicated SPACE
Almost half of SPACE is looked after by the Syndicate, a conglomeration of human and alien states with a vast shared fleet of starships that’s either an armada of science ships or a navy, depending on who you talk to. Certainly, the Syndicate is a peaceful society – but largely because they outlawed war a while back and threatened to annihilate anyone who so much as thought about starting a beef within their sprawling territory. It seems fair to me. Each Syndicate ship is run by an incredibly charismatic human Captain,[8] with a diverse senior management team under them, as well as a few-dozen randos with handguns.[9] Their missions, despite being much-celebrated as voyages of exploration, rarely seem to discover anything new. Indeed, 90 per cent of mission time tends to be spent having weirdly episodic encounters with well-known alien species, or solving outbreaks of bickering among the crew.
I put one leg up on the boulder and sighed, gazing wistfully at the immensity of the twin suns as they sank towards the hazy desert horizon. All was silent, except for the faint susurration of dust devils out on the plain. Soon, the smallest of the two stars would vanish completely. I coughed meaningfully and shot a quick glance over my shoulder. Grudgingly extinguishing her cigarette, the hired musician picked up her French horn and began to play the sad music I had requested, but the moment wasn’t quite what it could have been.
— FROM THE TRAVEL JOURNAL OF FLOYD WATT
4 Hard Vacuum
This harsh, sparsely inhabited region of SPACE is home to the only people Earth astrophysicists respect. Universally human, the societies of Hard Vacuum refuse to use commonplace technologies such as teleportation and faster-than-light travel, since they insist they just aren’t possible. These people even get irritated with the forgiving nature of the SPACE around them, and have embarked on massive engineering projects to make it colder and emptier, and to make planets in their territory more barren[10]. Still, even though their lives are lonely, dry, grim and difficult, the Hard Vacuumers take a great deal of pride in being more ‘legitimate’ than the colourful patchwork of cultures elsewhere in SPACE, whom they dismiss as mere fantasists.
5 The Galaxy
Although it’s not technically a galaxy at all, this clump of 284 star systems is the biggest single-civilisation grouping in SPACE, and so I suppose we have to respect what its inhabitants – the ever-brash Stellar Warriors – call it.[11] Comprising weirdly uniform planets, each with a single terrain type, the Galaxy is ruled over by a startlingly incompetent, vindictive dictatorship, forever snatching defeat from the jaws of victory against a small band of armed insurrectionists. For their own part, these insurrectionists could have dismantled the
