Prologue
Back on Novaris, humans evolved under a vast sky dotted with tiny specks of light. They looked up with wonder in their eyes. Some ascribed those flecks to the spirits of the past, and in a way, they weren't exactly wrong. Others saw them and they imagined that someday if they dedicated all of their hearts and efforts to it, they could reach out and touch them. They could examine and understand them up close. It was an ambitious view that fostered their development of space travel and technology. A few others that saw those distant stars, shifted their sight to the darkness in between and what they saw was emptiness. It made them feel small and alone. They felt uneasy knowing that there was so much emptiness with so little light. They were wrong though. Not for feeling scared and small, but because the in-between areas were only mostly empty and humans weren't alone.
Humanity grew until their large world was overflowing and when they realized that there was no more room for them, they spread themselves out to the nearby planets and the moons above those planets. They found ways to make the inhospitable environments habitable. They were able to thrive on the barren rocks floating around their sun and once they filled those rocks they expanded again.
It was like the universe was a tiered fountain and Novaris was the very top center that flowed out and down to fill up the next and the next after that.
The resources that they were able to gather were traded for the things that they needed to survive. The lifeblood of those worlds were the spaceships that traversed the vast black in between with the cargos that were moved to the places that needed them.
It seemed that humanity had no opposition to their expansion and for a long time, they met no other sentient life and were able to grow their technologies and expand their reach.
It wasn't until the galactic year 7742 that humans encountered the first opposition to their seemingly endless expansion, the Trilone. The Trilone was a technology-based life form that displayed the ability to adapt and learn.
Humans didn't know their adversary's origins, but they suspected that they must have been created as a weapon by some other life form that, as of yet, has never been encountered by us.
The Trilone looked like robot crabs. Though, crabs aren't typically 3ft tall with long saber-like spikes in place of their claws. They piloted their own space ships and they showed a propensity to slaughter anything that they deemed to be a threat. Their definition was quite broad, attacking nearly anything that moved.
By the galactic year 7800, humans had lost their home world, Novaris.
What must be understood though is that humans had already spread so far and wide throughout the galaxy that even with the tragic loss of their home world, they had reached a point where they were impossible to eradicate.
The threat to any one sector of the galaxy, posed by the Trilone was enormous, but the threat to all of humanity was non-existent.
Their enemy could secure an area of the great fountain, but the flow would continue casting outward even stronger everywhere else.
We weren't planning to just roll over and let them take what was ours though. If Humans were good at anything it was our ability to adapt and grow.