If you've got an idea for a piece that could fit into the UF universe, consider this: with a little modification, it may work just as well - or even better! - as a universe of its own. Try retooling it to stand on its own - you may be surprised at how rewarding the process is.

Okay Gryph. I'll take you up on that.

To everybody else:

This had been perking away at the back of my mind for the best part of six months. Since May, I've even been making some progress on the first story for my character. It's recognizably akin to UF, but then, so is Chessmen.

The work is, indeed, very satisfying.

Still, it's not moving fast enough. I hope that, by inviting everybody interested to come up with their own character concepts and jump in with both feet, I can add some additional go-juice to my own muse.

Plus I wanna show off my baby.

A political map set on the plane of the galaxy looked like
a rainbow sprinkled donut with a bite taken out of it.
But each of those thousand sprinkles was a star with an
inhabited world, and they told the tale of their allegiance
with their color.

Like tended to cluster to like - a dense spray of aqua
for the Humanx Commonwealth, a broad arc of forest green
for the Juraiian Empire, a cluster of royal purple for
the Centauri Republic -, but in the vastness of interstellar
space the concept of "borders" fuzzed and almost vanished.
A critical world of one polity could be closer to half a
dozen owing allegiance to another than to any of its own.

The hole was the Core, the poisoned place, where a million
stars baked each other and their satellite worlds in a
endless haze of lethal radiation. Resources there were as
dense as the deathlight, but still there were no permanent
colonies. Miners were paid absurd sums to come and monitor
and maintain automated equipment, but still. They came only
after making their donations to genetic banks that stored
reproductive cells indefinitely for only a nominal fee.

The service cost more than was charged, but the companies
took the rest of the bill. If the only way to get volunteers
for their operations was to offer absurd salaries and an
artificial garuantee of reproduction, so be it.

Besides, that was the only way the poor fools would ever
have healthy children.

The bite was the Darkvoid.

Once, long ago, there had been life there. Then, something
referred to cryptically in the records of the time as the
Darkvoid Device had snuffed a swath of stars across an
eighth of the galaxy. A thousand inhabited worlds had died
in an instant, and even a millenia later, a few more stars
winked out of the skies of the worlds along the Void's border
as the last light of a murdered sun passed unheeded.

But that was not the most horrible thing in the border,
in the Shadow Zone. There were ancient weapons there, lying
abandoned or left to their own devices, and the scarred worlds
where they had been used.

There were monsters there, things that stalked in nightmares.

Or out of them.

At the edges of the galaxy, the Toward Stars along the Core or
Outer Rim, along the Wastes, were the wilderzones, places wild,
untamed, and ungoverned. Home, it was true, to smugglers,
Outlaws and pirates, but mostly to honest folk who felt no
need to truck with governments.

To spinward of the Darkvoid was the Taiidani Empire, master of
Alderaan and Arrakis, Corellia and Caladan. It was the greatest
realm in the galaxy, and it was ruled from the Iron Throne on
Golgotha by the Empress Lionstone the XIV, the worshipped
and adored.

On Arrakis, a sandyhaired boy of nine looked up at the
nighttime wash of colored points that was the Core, and dreamed
of the father he who had died before he was born. A voice
called him to dinner. "Coming, Aunt Beru!" he shouted, before
scrambling down from his perch.

On Kharak, a billion people looked up at the washed out
daytime silloute of the Mothership, and dreamed of the day
ten years in the future when the vast craft would be complete
and the chosen few would go Home.

Spinward again, and inward of the private space where the Vorlon
spun webs for the betterment of the younger races, the Narn
carved their Regime and their freedom from the bleeding flank of
the Centauri Republic.

Spinward still, to where the war fleets of the Mimbari crashed
against the thin dike of Terra's guardians like a tidal bore
against a wooden fence. Most of the defenders were not even
warships, and lacked the targeting and weapons systems that
would have let them do more than die bravely. But, reasoned
their crews, they were dead anyway. Why not die for a cause,
with the harness at their backs?

Spinward yet again, past the verdant, ancient worlds of the
Jurai, to the space dubbed the Inner Sphere by the primitive
explorers who had expanded its borders until they ran against
their nearest neighbors (to the intense surprise of the former,
who had thought themselves the only sentient race in the
universe). All across four of the five Sucessor States who
fueded over the bones of the brief, glorious Star League,
consternation spread.

The Peace Proposal had arrived.

Spinward, then, one final time, to where the expansionist
People's Republic of Haven looked with hungry eyes and the
perpetual meltdown of the Silesian Confederacy. If they went
inward towards the worlds that they needed to feed their
economy, they faced the Andermani Empire.

But outward, ah, nothing but a small trading power known as
Manticore, where Captain Senior Grade Honor Harrington
stroked the arms of the command chair of her brand new
heavy cruiser.

And now come full circle and return to the Darkvoid, where,
for all that no ship has ever returned from its depths,
something hungry lives, if that is the word, and looks out
onto the light with hatred.

To the north of the galactic plane, there was an otherwise
unremarkable sun with only a single solid world for company.
Most of the endless serried ranks of ships that circled
it had been waiting for millenia as their numbers slowly
grew, waiting for the day when they would finally go forth to
smite the Nest Killers. Everything was almost ready.

In a mere ten years, nothing would stand against them.

To the south, looking up at the shining spiral, the last
Battlestar, Galactica, led a ragtag, fugitive fleet, on a
lonely quest, for a shining planet out of legend. Behind
her cruised the Cylon Armada, bent on the completion of
the task they had begun. But they could not catch her and
hers, not in the utter void of intergalactic space.

So, for now, there was ten years respite - until they
reached the galaxy ahead of them, and things got dangerous
again.

-T-H-E- -S-H-I-N-I-N-G- -S-P-R-I-A-L-
ARC I: TEN YEARS

Blessed be.
Nathan Baxter