“Understand this: we have only one crime in the Empire. That crime is choice-theft. “Underlying every principle of our law, more fundamental even than the Contract and the Charter, is jírileth – the principle of liberty. The principle that all sophonts, all with reason and will, should be afforded the greatest
Cut And Paste Environments: Common to begin with in outposts, new colonies, and a whole range of other environments where you’re trying to get established quickly and where you’re working on a budget; modular systems and prefabricated constructions dominate this market, courtesy of Llyn Standard Manufacturing, ICC and
“The Seam” refers to the region of the Associated Worlds in direct contact with the Voniensa Republic, consisting of the Crimson Expanse, the Vanguard Reaches, and Csell Buffer constellations on our side of the border, and Vonis 31, Vonis 36, and Vonis 41 on the Republic side. The Borderline arterial
Curse of the Ancients: Quite common, with the wrinkle that the specific form it takes is the use of curses from local languages, rather than the Eldraeic interlingua. (There are other circumstances for this relapse to locality, of course, but they have more to do with what’s chic in
Curb-Stomp Battle: Happens quite routinely to new members of the Interstellar League of Tribal Chiefdoms, many of whom explode off their worlds with a tremendous sense of hubris as yet unblemished by a realistic threat assessment of current galactic civilization. This attitude is, ahem, corrected quite swiftly. For example, this
CS Extropy Rising, entering Galáré system. Core, Command Bridge Two hours later, Svínif looked around the conference table, and wished his old headache back. “Preliminary reports. Let’s see what we have. Comms?” “EM emissions from our target world, just as the exception said, all over from log-8 to log-10.
Culture Clash: All. The. Time. The really big ones, like between the Imperials and the Hope Hegemony or the Equality Concord at one end of the spectrum, and between them and the Rim Free Zone at the other, and between the Photonic Network and all meat intelligences everywhere, etc., are
“The difficulties of interstellar travel are widely underestimated. Within the stargate plexus, even simple ships — capable of only relatively low accelerations, capable of being built by cultures little more capable than those which have developed orbital flight, and requiring no extraordinary skill for a single sophont to pilot and maintain
Cult Colony: Averted initially, because sublight colonization was so ludicrously expensive that “cults” couldn’t possibly have afforded it. Played straighter once the stargate plexus made it easier to get to new worlds, with a side-note that the failure rate – for which read death rate – of these is particularly high;
Cryonics Failure: While not nearly as bad as some of the examples given under the trope – for example, with the exception of the ill-fated Valiár (Thirteen Colonies) mission, whose failure was the result of engine defects rather than cryonics problems, virtually all of the cryostatic colonists were revived safely on
“INASMUCH as the proven success of the Thirteen Colonies and their foundation by means of lighthugger colony ships has demonstrated the viability of such starships for interstellar voyaging; “And inasmuch as the reconnection of the Thirteen Colonies to the metropolitan Empire and our Reunification has demonstrated the potential of the
Here’s the next six cards (previous 1-6, 7-12). Only six more to go! 13. THE CITY The marble spires of the city pierce the heavens, roofed in gleaming gold and copper and silver, and tunnels below delve deep into the earth. Balconies and plazas are crowded with people of