A history of the lanes
Six hundred years, give or take. Nobody is precise about it, and that is the point.
The Opening
The first rift is found. Within a lifetime the lanes are being run.
The Charter Years
Chartered companies run the first lanes under licence from the old world. The greatest was the Meridium Charter; its beacons still ping in the slack with codes nobody uses any more.
The Parting
The old world stops answering. The charters go bankrupt within a decade, and the new systems have to feed themselves.
The Glass Years
The first Rift Glass comes in, nobody knows what it does, and it gets into everything. Out of the panic comes the Registry, and the Registry becomes the Core Authority.
The Long Stop
Haulers, underpaid and overtaxed, stop flying. All of them, for forty days. Three systems nearly starve. When the lanes reopen, the haulers have a guild, the Free Traders Union, and a sentence every pilot learns: without haulers, the systems starve.
The Push
A generation of prospectors follows the lanes rimward. The Frontier Collective forms out of the camps and the claims.
The Quiet Trade
Wherever the Registry said no, somebody said yes for a price. Nobody can name the day the Syndicate began, which is how it likes it.
Now
Thirty lit systems. The Rift has started giving up more than it used to: more glass, more hulks, more ghosts in the slack. Nobody likes to say so out loud.
- Far future, some six hundred years into the lanes. Nobody is precise about it, and that is the point.
- Real stars, every one of them.
- Earth is "the old world." It exists, it is far off, and it plays no part in daily life.
The old world
- The star names are the old world's. Rigel, Deneb, Achernar: the one thing everybody brought with them. Most pilots cannot say what the names mean. The Haulers' Almanac can.
- No board in charted space has ever posted a contract to the old world. Nobody can say when the last one was.
- Some grudges are older than the lanes.