Note on dating:
IK, or Iset Krekaru, the Year of the Revolution. Expressed as the number of years following the siege of Najolrecht (Earth) from the Voorqhac by the Herjonin, combined with the date as measured on the day cycle of Najolrecht. There are five periods of 73 days in each year. The date 58, 62-4 IK, for example, would be the 62nd day of the 4th period in the 58th year following the revolution.
Year Zero marks the beginning of the siege.
For reference, the siege of Najolrecht (0 IK) took place around 4120 BC.
The following events extend well beyond that point. Nevertheless it is a significant point and the nearest to which these events begin, and so is used here to start.
After the fall of the Herjonin and Voorqhac that date becomes less relevant. After that the more relevant dating system, for our purposes, of BC and AD is used.
Common Space is an arbitrary section of the galaxy marked into the Cygnus arm with a volume of 600,000 cubic light years (see under the Maps section Map from The One and Map of Common Space for reference). Common Space lies some 54,000 light years from Earth and encompasses all the known human worlds in that section of the galaxy. It was given the name Common Space in 1645 AD by a race known as the Echelaedi, to signify that the area was common to all of known humanity.
HISTORY OF COMMON SPACE
[176 IK]
As is laid out in the document, Timeline of the Human Wars, by the end of 176 IK the Voorqhac had retaken the key world Najolrecht. This was the centerpoint of the Herjonin revolution, and in many ways their greatest stronghold. Civil war had been growing throughout the republic; the securing of Najolrecht by the Voorqhac only caused the revolution to spread.
The areas of space surrounding Najolrecht sat in proximity to the mass of the Voorqhac republic and had for the longest time comprised a tenuous position for the rebel Herjonin. With the taking of Najolrecht it wasn't long before the Voorqhac began collapsing the rest of the Herjonin sphere of control, and by 181 IK had driven the rebels completely from that area.
[181 - 188 IK]
As it became clear to the Herjonin that they could no longer hold against the increasingly determined might of the Voorqhac they withdrew to an area of space surrounding one of their major installations, Esceria Kom. This zone was well removed from the nearest Voorqhac border, accessible in only two ways: 1. Direct travel, which had a prohibitively long transit time of 16 months, or 2. Via gated singularity. The connecting singularity occupied a zone in close contact with Voorqhac space. However, as a small, finite area it was defensible by the Herjonin fleets. They were thus able to control access, allowing them to move and mass forces safely removed from the Voorqhac threat, while protecting easy access to and from their enemy. This allowed them to stage raids to push back their area of control around the singularity, while bringing many of their fleets to the Esceria Kom zone.
The civil war between factions of the Voorqhac expanded. Where there was unrest, unrest developed into conflict; where there was conflict, conflict developed into war.
[189 - 230 IK]
During this span of years the Herjonin influence throughout the Voorqhac republic saw many worlds take up that banner in revolution, continuing the intensifying conflict. Seeing the importance of the gated singularity to Esceria Kom and the strategic refuge it afforded the Herjonin, the Voorqhac early on focused their resources in this area, taking control and then chasing the Herjonin from the areas of space surrounding what had become their key base of operations.
Already in the galactic outlands and unable to traverse the now Voorqhac controlled singularity this action served to scatter a significant fraction of the Herjonin forces, placing them out of contact with the republic and their allies.
In their retreat the Herjonin discovered a closely spaced set of habitable systems far from the singularity and made a stand there. The Voorqhac were not able to continue to extend their advance and so the Herjonin were left again in a state of control, only this time in no real useful position. The systems they held were deep on the galactic edge, far from any civilized area.
The state of the Voorqhac republic meanwhile continued to deteriorate, politics in the Voorqhac senate adding to what was clearly becoming a collapse. That collapse is pertinent to the history of Common Space only in that it later left the worlds of Common Space isolated, as will be seen, but the full demise of the Voorqhac is itself a long and involved affair and will not be gone into more than is needed here.
[230 - 238 IK]
Several events unfolded during this time.
On Najolrecht (Earth) the Voorqhac had by now removed all traces of the Herjonin's prior occupation. All elements of the UCN had been rounded up and imprisoned or killed. Agents of the Voorqhac among the populace had been recalled or were also imprisoned or killed. Najolrecht was left in it's native state, much as it had been prior to the Voorqhac arrival hundreds of years before.
The system had at last been ordered destroyed, but this order was never carried out. Perhaps out of some deep seated hope, that the treasures of the ancient Goyle (see the document Events Leading to the Siege of Earth) should be preserved, or from some other motivation, the fleet commandant responsible for that order failed to comply.
A perimeter was set up to shield that world from any effort to retake it. As a last act the Voorqhac took from the world human specimens from most of the major sub-races and transported them on great arks, destined initially for Esceria Kom and worlds in that zone of space. The purpose of their transport will be seen.
These would eventually become the humans of Common Space.
While these events were going on the Herjonin in the far reaches of the Esceria Kom area determined that they could not stage a counter-assault against the Voorqhac forces massed at the gated singularity, preventing their return. They were, however, able to determine those forces were now somewhat of an independent, loyal to a fleet admiral that had staged a coup and separated from the Voorqhac Fleet Command and War Council.
To the Herjonin this was a clear indication that the Voorqhac senate was continuing to lose its hold. They built their resolve to return to the regions of the republic and rejoin the fight there. The Herjonin, waiting as they were, could do nothing but deteriorate. It was likely that in the same amount of time it would take them to traverse open space back to the republic, nothing new would develop to change things where they were.
They decided they couldn't risk that chance.
On 238, 34-3 IK the Herjonin fleets set out on the long journey across open space to the known edge of the Voorqhac republic.
[238 - 241 IK]
The departure of the Herjonin fleets was noted by the admiral over the Voorqhac fleets in the area but not relayed. By now his group and others formed their own faction with their own ideals, and he saw the departing Herjonin as a boon; another who might do some of his work for him and help bring down the senate and republic. The Herjonin themselves could be dealt with later.
He had joined forces, in fact, with the commandant of the Najolrecht region and together they were strategizing their development of the singularity and Esceria Kom area into a stronghold of their own.
As part of their activities and preparations the commandant originally envisioned creating some sort of infiltration army using the humans transported from Najolrecht, as humans were still regarded lightly by Voorqhac throughout the republic. Remnants of the once troublesome UCN remained, but fought most often in the company of the Herjonin. There were human servants and even some delegates that worked in and around the Voorqhac senate and core worlds. It was believed that these ignorant natives from Najolrecht, properly programmed, could be placed in key areas in sufficient numbers to topple the seats of Voorqhac command from within.
This plan never materialized. The steps to pull off such a scheme were never undertaken as the war continued to intensify.
[242 - 1084 IK / End: 1916 IK]
Drawn back into the fight, the Voorqhac splinter elements eventually abandoned that area of space altogether. As a security measure, to allow themselves a place to regroup, they chose another singularity in the Esceria Kom zone, one that lead still further to the edge of the galaxy, to one of the outermost arms (Cygnus), and there finding an unusual concentration of habitable worlds made ready a fallback position. They called this area the Far Reaches. Later the humans would call it Common Space. There they transplanted the humans from Najolrecht, planning to use them as needed for labor. Over a short span of time, however, the Voorqhac were forced to withdraw the sum of their forces back to the front.
They never returned.
Over the next 840 years the Voorqhac republic collapsed, fragmenting into smaller and more isolated states. After that it was only a matter of time.
The last coherent Voorqhac state fell in 2204 BC.
[3212 BC - 1512 AD]
The humans, then, were left scattered among many worlds, some 18 in all, separated and without any technology or knowledge — no more capable than they had been in their native state on Najolrecht. For thousands of years these islands of humanity evolved. Near to each other in a galactic sense, impossibly far apart in a very real sense, developing technologies independently, suffering among their local social conditions, unaware of anyone else except in legend; the time of the Voorqhac which had brought them there so long ago. Isolated, their individual paths had no bearing on events.
Until the first of them reached into the stars.
[1513 AD]
The Echelaedi were the first of the human races to develop a method of traveling between star systems. They successfully sent a team to their closest neighbor in Terran AD 1523, making the trip in just five months. The closest star had no habitable planets, but colonization wasn't their goal. That they could reach another star at all was their aim and, proving that, the race was on to spread outward into space.
[1514 AD - 1529 AD]
Advancing their technology the Echelaedi were soon able to move even quicker between their neighboring star systems, and in 1521 AD had discovered, and were moving their first colonists to, a brand new world.
Not long after that, as their scouts continued their expanding search for territory, they encountered their first alien race.
[1529 AD]
The Wyvulsk were fierce, physically the human's superior, in addition to having a technological edge. They had set out into space in 1480 AD, ahead of the humans, though their technology did not come from the same process of discovery the Echelaedi had to work through. In 1350 AD the Wyvulsk homeworld had been a balkanized world at war with itself, not much technically advanced beyond the means to dominate the globe. It was in 1350, then, that they discovered a derelict. A space craft that had crashed on their homeworld of Maexoron thousands of years before.
Their political and technological state at the time meant that this was not immediately acted on. Wars were fought over it, the derelict changing hands several times, attempts made to understand it, none successful. It was old, non-functional, and the Wyvulsk science of the day could make no sense of it.
But that changed with time, as did general political view. The craft came to symbolize a point of unity, a common goal that might save them from themselves. And so alliances were formed, science was given the stability it needed and progress was made.
In 1477 AD the craft's drive mechanics were understood.
In 1479 AD the first Wyvulsk starship was completed.
In 1480 the Wyvulsk set out for the stars.
They colonized close to Maexoron at first, then extended their range with no apparent methodology. One of the distant systems they colonized was Axeoran. A system not far from the world Echael, and directly on the colonization path of the Echelaedi.
When they collided in 1529 AD it was the beginning of the first interstellar war amongst the worlds of Common Space.
[1529 AD - 1601 AD]
The war between the Wyvulsk and Echelaedi was brutal, the Wyvulsk nearly overrunning the human homeworld Echael early on in the conflict. But the Wyvulsk forces were far from their nucleus of power and, over some years of skirmishes both in space and over worlds, the Echelaedi were able to hold and then push them back. During this period the Echelaedi developed their technological potential, stealing in some cases from the Wyvulsk, reaching a point of technical superiority.
However, both races were greatly weakened. Neither could keep pace. In 1601 AD a DMZ was established around the Wyvulsk colony world of Axeoran. No treaty was signed nor proposed; it was understood that the two were still at war, and likely would be until one of them was destroyed, the DMZ little more than an unspoken agreement.
[1603 AD - 1622 AD]
On the opposite corner of what would later be called Common Space, another race of the seeded humans, the Nordans, were taking their first steps into space. Their first journey to a new star system was in 1603 AD.
Another of the human races, the Verik of Vermeteko, launched their first space flight in 1637 AD. Each of these races was separated from the other by some distance, but moving steadily into space.
In 1622 AD the Echelaedi made contact with an alien race known as the Raspart, reaching the Raszpa system in the galactic tailward direction from Echael. The Raspart were a mild, philosophical race of lesser technology and the Echelaedi were able to establish trade agreements with them easily.
[1639 AD - 1643 AD]
Continuing to heed the standoff across the Wyvulsk DMZ the Echelaedi expanded their colonization efforts toward the galactic rim and soon discovered the world of Zireb.
Amazingly, it was a world of humans.
This scientific impossibility was met with disbelief. More, studies of the Zire humans determined them to be of the same genetic strain as the Echelaedi. The Zire were not much advanced beyond gunpowder and the working of simple metals; still, the necessary hypothesis was that both they and the Echelaedi came from a common origin.
Impossible to understand as it was, that hypothesis did offer an explanation for what had been another deep mystery:
Namely, that the Echelaedi's own evolutionary record on Echael was a dead end.
Their anthropologists had never been able to connect their own race to the genetic line of their homeworld. The idea was then put forth that both they and the Zire, who were also unique to their world, may have come from the stars.
The Ancients Theory became a topic of much scientific debate, and by 1643 AD was generally accepted as fact, lacking only a detailed explanation. The Echelaedi made it a cultural objective to uncover their past.
[1644 AD - 1645 AD]
In 1644 AD an Echelaedi scientific team working on Raszpa learned that the Raspart government was in possession of an extremely old technological relic. The Raspart themselves appreciated its possible significance, but had never done much more than observe and store it. The Echelaedi team eagerly secured rights to conduct their own investigations of the artifact.
Early on in their study they decided that this could likely be the clue to their heritage; clear evidence of a race advanced enough to have moved among the stars in a distant enough past to have accounted for the seeding of the Echelaedi and Zire. Dating placed the relic's age at three to four thousand years — a date concurrent with the appearance of the Echelaedi in the anthropological records of Echael.
Another race on the fringes of Common Space, with which the Raspart occasionally traded, provided the final key to unlocking the mysteries of the ancient artifact. This race employed an old trade dialect known as the Cody tongue. Users of this dialect long ago had contact with a pilgrim race, which had itself conducted trade with a race known as the Voorqhac when they moved briefly in that area. This was the link the Echelaedi scientists needed, allowing them to decipher the language of what they now determined was a Voorqhac artifact. From it they learned that the Voorqhac were considerably advanced, far beyond the Echelaedi, their seats of power far across the galaxy. Further they learned that the Voorqhac did transplant them, and the Zire, along with many others. They could only surmise that the Voorqhac had left the area for good, many thousands of years before.
Primarily, however, the Echelaedi got from the artifact a picture of the scope of the Voorqhac activity, and the density of habitable worlds in their section of space. They named the region Common Space, and decided to begin at once a search for other human races.
[1650 AD]
The Verik discovered the human world Breczan, drawing similar conclusions as the Echelaedi, imagining a one-race from long ago, possibly an ancient civilization from which they all sprang.
[1680 AD - 1705 AD]
In their own colonial expansion the Verik stumbled across the Wyvulsk fleet base Nenecoron. This ignited another war. The Verik, as the Echelaedi, were less capable than the Wyvulsk and began to fall successively back across their battle lines. Not long into the conflict their homeworld was in jeopardy.
At first believing these Verik humans might somehow be connected to the Echelaedi the Wyvulsk violated the established DMZ and fell upon several Echelaedi colonies in the areas around the Wyvulsk world of Axeoran. Seeing this as a reinstatement of conflict the Echelaedi responded, shifting their resources back to the business of war.
But it wasn't long before they learned of the trigger that set the Wyvulsk off: Another human race, spinward from them and evidently powerful enough to present a direct threat to the fearsome aliens.
Echelaedi intelligence derived the location of the far away human world and envoys were sent. Vermeteko received them gladly and, under the duress of war and the imminence of the Wyvulsk, a hasty alliance was crafted. The Echelaedi committed their forces to the defense of Vermeteko and her colonies and, on two fronts, the humans pressed the Wyvulsk back to another standoff.
In 1705 AD the Wyvulsk DMZ was re-established. This time, however, tension was much higher and no strategist or politician expected that it would remain intact for long.
[1706 AD]
Forged in battle the Echelaedi/Verik alliance was afterwards strengthened through the formation of the Human League. The Echelaedi assumed a leadership role with no opposition from the Verik. Both retained full autonomy, but agreed to engage in certain joint objectives, chief among them, 1. Discovering the remaining human races and bringing them into the League and, 2. Continuing the quest for a more complete picture of the Voorqhac and the technology they once possessed.
[1711 AD]
Meanwhile, farther spinward than either the Verik of Echelaedi, the Nordan colonization paths led them to discover their first other human inhabited world, Arkrai. Far removed from most of the original seeding patterns of the Voorqhac the Nordans had built a large republic of colonies and were well established by the time they made this discovery.
[1712 AD - 1730 AD]
The Echelaedi/Verik discovered the human worlds of Remmhorad, Nin and Chet, bringing them into the Human League, giving them the technology they would need to build and add their strength to the alliance.
[1733 AD]
The Wyvulsk discovered a Voorqhac artifact. The League learned of it through their intelligence network. This served to raise tensions across the Human League and the insistence that they piece together the Voorqhac puzzle before the Wyvulsk.
At that point the Wyvulsk DMZ had held beyond expectations. Focus seemed to have shifted on both sides to exploration, the Wyvulsk also determined to advance their technology through discovery.
[1740 AD - 1853 AD]
Drugan and Tian were discovered by the Human League. The Echelaedi set about incorporating them.
Then in 1751 AD a fully intact Voorqhac probe was discovered by the Echelaedi. The probe and the information it was able to provide — and, perhaps more significantly, not provide — drove their determination to new levels, along with their insistence on a human Manifest Destiny that was becoming a central part of their political philosophy.
This activity continued, the Human League eventually coming into contact with the Nordans in 1801 AD, setting the now vast republics at odds with each other and, eventually, at war. Outside this the Wyvulsk remained a formidable force, leaving three major powers in what evolved into a race to discover the legacy of the Voorqhac.
Then, in 1853 the Echelaedi and Human League uncovered the remains of a Voorqhac installation. More importantly, intact library records etched in metal. Of great interest was the fact that these records suggested the existence of an even older race than the Voorqhac, a race known as the Goyle. A race which was beyond even the Voorqhac in terms of advancement. The Goyle legacy was so key, in fact, that the Voorqhac had evidently been at war over the possession of some of the Goyle artifacts when they last left Common Space thousands of years ago.
According to the artifact the Goyle had once ruled the entire galaxy. It was imagined that discovering their technology would permit another race to do the same. This promise only served to reinforce the Echelaedi's conviction of Manifest Destiny. The discovery of this library was, perhaps, the final event in the Echelaedi transformation to a race of zealots, setting up greater conflicts among the major powers of the region as each began a fight to realize this same reign. To find the legacy of the ancient Goyle.
This history forms the basis for much of the early action in The One. More info on events transpiring after those outlined here can be found in that book.
