Background

By the 24th century, advancing technology has enabled a human diaspora throughout space. Planets orbiting remote stars are licensed to large corporations, who develop the world to suit their needs. The eagerness to turn investment into profit means that hastily-built settlements are rapidly populated by a combination of adventurers and those who have been dispossessed of their homes on Earth. Added to this group are the growing number of Earth’s undesirables who find their name added to some arbitrary blacklist. The various agencies on Earth regularly round up political dissenters and others who annoy the ruling elite. Few of those accused of dissent will receive any form of judicial hearing or trial. They are quickly and quietly transported to one of the more remote sectors of human occupied space where few laws exist.

The settlements in the Tenth sector of human occupied space, are little better than squalid ghettos, with residents enduring a subsistence level of life little different from medieval serfdom. Unsurprisingly, the Tenth sector settlements are a popular destination to send those banished from Earth. However, a combination of corporate devotion to profit, widespread corruption, and general incompetence, threaten the very existence of those worlds as they struggle for survival. The ores and chemicals mined and manufactured in the Tenth sector are shipped to lucrative markets, but very little of the money generated finds its way back to those living in the Tenth sector. Perhaps that is what attracts the barbarian raiders from neighbouring sectors. They are like vultures waiting to pick the bones of the nearly-dead. To those on Earth and the core worlds of the First and Second sectors, residents of the Tenth sector are considered to be little better than vermin. Hence the lack of any serious action to stop the barbarian raiders from the rogue Thirteenth and Fourteenth sectors.