Rising Star

It is 3122, and things have been quiet. Two years have passed since the serpent civil war ended. After the half year spent in serpent space, much was changing in serpent-human relations. The serpents are a reptilian race, which has been allied with the Romani for three hundred years. However, only in the past two years did the two species actually make a real attempt to understand each other. This was the result of a civil war, which almost ended the alliance. The serpents were now fully integrated into the civilian and military aspects of Nova Romae, the home world of the Romani. Most of human space is governed by seven large and nine small corporations on whom all human government fell when earth destroyed itself in the last world war. It took centuries to repopulate earth and that only to make it a museum planet for tourists. When the corporations took over governance of human space, they ran their territories with the same autocratic zeal as they ran their companies. As a result, the CEOs became warlords and they would not accept any dissent. Eight hundred years in the past, they began exiling their dissenters, whistleblowers and intellectuals, towards the edge of the galaxy, in decommissioned ships. Many died along the way and the survivors called it the Great Spinward Exodus. Those outcasts who survived found a gem of a planet outside corporate space. Being intellectuals, they founded a republic modeled after the ancient Roman republic. They call themselves the Romani and they named their new world Nova Romae. The republic grew into 386 member systems with one goal: to exact revenge on those who cast them out. Activity along the border with corporate space would soon give them the chance...