Monday April 15, 2002
Book 2: The Teraport Wars — The Teraport Wars
Note: While it is not, strictly speaking, necessary for the reader to page back to the beginning to understand what's going on, paging back to last year's Battle for the Wormgate story may provide some elucidating background information with a very healthy side-order of BLAM.

By way of summary, the 115,128 networked, civilized star systems of the 31st-century Milky-Way Galaxy (population: 10,283 trillion and four. No... wait. Five. Err... three. Crap. Hold still.) are connected by wormgates, which are run by the Gatekeeper Corporation. This corporation looks on the surface to be a friendly conglomerate of diverse races, but is actually managed by the F'Sherl-Ganni, a race of six-limbed, ten-handed goat-lizards that has been pulling strings for longer than humans have been walking upright.

Admiral Breya and her brother Kevyn inadvertently upset this age-old order of commerce by introducing a new hyperdrive that works independently of the wormgate network. One thing led to another (read that "people started killing people"), and now the Milky Way is in the throes of what 32nd-century historians and galacartographers will call "The Teraport Wars." (Interestingly, they'll look back on it as a colorful, yet statistically insignificant pimple on the face of history compared to the events that follow it, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) In response to the chaos, and armed with insider knowledge about the F'Sherl-Ganni and the insidious side of their wormgates, Admiral Breya has undertaken a rather ambitious campaign to destroy their infrastructure, and release their choke-hold on Galactic Society.

We'd mention here what the 32nd-century historians have to say about Breya's campaign, but it's much more interesting to live through history than to read about it (assuming, of course, that you actually live through it).

Transcript

Narrator: The comprehensibility inverse-square law basically states that from a distance, things are harder to make sense of.
Narrator: That twinkling light where no star used to be resolves into a fiery variegated marble.
Narrator: . . .Which in turn resolves into a fiery, variegated sphere. . .
Narrator: What the heck. Let's zoom all the way in.
F'sherl Civilian: Aaaaiiiieeee! We're all going to die!!!
Narrator: Oh yeah. . . Now it makes sense. . .
Narrator: Admiral Breya Andreyasn: Entrepreneur, Mercenary, Outcast, Fleet Admiral. . .
Narrator: She's been busy over the last few weeks.
Narrator: She's turned a hold full of frozen freedom fighters into the 'First Alliance Navy,' found and destroyed a Gatekeeper Buuthandi with a fleet of several hundred capital ships, and now leads a frantic attempt to liberate its prisoners and plunder its technology.
Narrator: Admiral, we'd all love to know just how you pulled this off.
Breya: I tell you what. If I fail to make it big in this endeavor, maybe I'll try to cash in on the self-help circuit.