destroyed while others believed that it had jumped not to another part of space, but into another dimension, one from which it could never return. As the centuries came and went the Earth gradually passed out of history and then became a legend of a distant past.
one third of Dominion space and those within the League’s influence flourished. Not all planets welcomed the League’s ever growing power and distrust and unease was not uncommon. With the huge trade between the systems
THE DARK TIMES By the 30th century, without a single governing body, wars raged across the Dominion. Colonies fought each other for the same resources as they expanded from their original planets. During this time nations and empires rose and fell and whole planets were laid waste by greed. The hyper-beacons continued to decay and the paths between the stars began to once again become unusable. In isolation whole worlds degenerated and regressed as technologies became forgotten or obsolete. THE TRADE LEAGUE At the turn of the 40th century 24 of the most developed worlds in the Dominion united to form the Trade League, with the goal of repairing the network of hyper-beacons and once again bring the Dominion back together. Isolated planets paid the League to be re-connected to the rest of humanity. Within a century the hyper-beacon network had been restored to over
pirates multiplied, ambushing ‘space caravans’ between far off worlds. In response to the growing pirate threat the League formed a military arm and renamed itself the Trade Protectorate. The fleets and armies of the Protectorate became a powerful fighting force which delivered swift and brutal order to the Dominion. But with this new military might resentment of the Protectorate’s power was greater than ever and its exploitation of many planets for the benefit of its core worlds grew even more blatant. THE TRADE WARS Angered by centuries of exploitation many worlds refused Protectorate trade
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and military assistance and dealt only with those outside of the Protectorate. Membership to the Protectorate could not be forced and so nothing could legally be done to stop a world that chose to close its space ports. However, Protectorate leaders were not willing to let these planets leave so easily. Secretly, they hired mercenaries to raid and harass these planets until the planetary leaders had no choice but to come back to the Protectorate for help. For a century the Protectorate carried out this practice until hundreds of planets were ready to rebel against the Protectorate. Then, at the very moment when the Dominion was about to go to war with itself again, another more dangerous enemy emerged. THE APPEARANCE OF THE EMPIRE In 4451 a fleet of heavy spaceships suddenly attacked planets under the Protectorate’s control. These were the descendents of the old Reconnaissance Corps …the Empire Polaris as it now called itself was revealed to the universe. The Empire’s lightning fast assault on Protectorate space took the whole of the Dominion by surprise. During the first ten years of the invasion, the Empire enslaved the peoples of three hundred of the Protectorate’s eight hundred planets.