MAN DID NOT expand into the galaxy. He exploded into it with an optimism and level of energy that hadn’t been seen in several millennium. There was no plan to this explosion, no form or purpose. Individuals, governments, traders, and criminals generally followed the paths of least resistance across the hundreds of worlds capable of supporting Terran life.
One of the more unusual results of this erratic expansion was that man settled a long string of stars stretching outward along the upper edge of the spiral arm in which Earth was situated. Several hundred light years out they discovered the Far Stars Cluster, containing six thousand stars and over a hundred eminently habitable’ planets in a relatively small volume of space. Man encountered often fierce resistance from the races already living in the cluster, but within three centuries was entrenched in the cluster. Even a major war against the powerful and militaristic Gerin only served to strengthen and unite all the worlds under the banner of the xenophobic League of Man.
Fifty years after the Gerin War, the Far Stars were crowded, civilized, and safe. They were too powerful to attack and too prosperous to allow change. Those with too much ambition, or too little sense, once again began traveling beyond the known worlds. As always, those who led this lurch outward were the desperate and those who had to be the first on new worlds. With no FTL radio, each of the newly settled planets was still basically on its own. The men who first explored—and often were the first to die on—the new planets often gave their names to worlds they found. Worlds such as Shelling, Silvercase, and Douglas. Arista itself was named after the wife of its discoverer, Christopher Blancmont. After the loners, came the exploiters, those who were attracted by the easy wealth the first men found. Finally, there came those who were to stay, to settle, and those who carne to live off of them, the bureaucrats and the merchants.
Arista was settled early in this new wave of human expansion. It was a rich world, full of fertile soils and easily mined minerals. It was ideally located to serve as a connection to the distant League and dozens of developing new planets. The population grew quickly as did the world’s wealth. The Aristans parlayed this advantage into a growing mercantile empire. The total population of Arista when the war started was five million.
Soon the small but aggressive Aristan navy directly controlled a massive volume of space and a half-dozen worlds. Many other planet’s settlers and nonhuman races now found they now had no choice but to deal through Arista. On Arista, a generation grew to assume prosperity was their right, no matter what the cost to others. Others, equally rapacious, became wealthy almost overnight. Arista had the feel of a boom town, and its leaders soon became interested only in keeping the boom going with little regard for the consequences.