The Web and aliens

The Web

The Web is the network of alien waystations that link solar systems across the galaxy. When in orbit of a waystation, a ship can fold to another solar system whose waystation is connected to it (see Technology).

The Solar Supremacy hid the waystations from the nations. At the end of the Solar War, the defeated Solar Navy retreated through them to other solar systems.
After the war, the nations found the Sol Waystation by tracking the retreating Solar Navy.
Do not damage the Waystations is one of the undisputed laws of Sovereign.
The waystations are now open, and the solar nations are spreading across the Web. New waystations are still being found. In one, NOVA is refusing entry, claiming the systems beyond are too dangerous and empty of anything worth salvaging (see The Plutocracy).
Callisto claims to have gone deeper into the Web than any other humans.

Ports of call: Out in the Web there are stations, hubs and ports where voidsmen rest, trade and drink, and where crews from rival nations rub shoulders. Most are under the control of a particular faction.

The waystations of Sol

The Sol Waystation was only the first. Over the century since the Solar War, explorers have found at least five waystations within humanity's own solar system. All of them are small, dark and easily missed, a few hundred metres to a few kilometres across. Some are encased in ice, some buried in rubble, and some are damaged or dormant. For centuries telescopes took them for ordinary asteroids or comets, and the Solar Supremacy kept the ones it found secret. Every one is usable by any nation, though some see far more of one faction than others.

No two waystations look alike. Each seems to have been built by a different alien civilisation, in a different age, from different materials and to a different design. Their existence suggests that the solar system has been visited many times over millions of years, and some wonder whether life has arisen here more than once.

Because everything orbits, the waystations are never fixed in place relative to the nations. One may sit close to a world for years, then drift to the far side of the Sun. Travel times, launch windows and which nation is nearest change constantly, and no power can guard every waystation at once.

The Sol Waystation: the first found, by tracking the retreating Solar Navy. It's an ancient spire of dark crystal half-sunk in an icy body in the Kuiper belt, and the busiest waystation of all.
The Belt Waystation: found by Ce-Co prospectors in the main asteroid belt, disguised as a metallic asteroid. Inside is a hollow lattice of an unknown alloy.
The Frozen Waystation: locked inside a comet in the Kuiper belt. It's organic-looking, almost grown, as if it were once alive.
The Trojan Waystation: among the asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit. It's a cluster of smooth stone rings, cracked and partly broken.
The Sunward Waystation: on a tight orbit close to the Sun, scorched and hard to see in the glare. It's small, silent and geometrically perfect, made of something nobody can identify, and its nearest neighbour is Mercury.

Each waystation leads to different systems, and as the Web is mapped, explorers find routes that loop between them. A flotilla might leave by one waystation, cross several systems, and come home by another.

Nobody believes these five are all there are. Others may still lie hidden in the belts or the far dark, and the Solar Supremacy may have known of some that the nations have never found. That raises an uncomfortable possibility. If such a waystation exists, the remnants of the Solar Navy, replenished and strong, could have a secret way back into the solar system and could return at any moment.

Aliens

After finding the Sol Waystation and exploring the first hundred systems, it did not take humanity long to discover it wasn't the only one using the waystations. Many alien species travel the void looking for suitable places to colonise and exploit. Very few of them are able and willing to communicate with humans, and most are a danger.

The five kinds of alien life

Humanity is far from alone in the void. Almost every solar system reached through a waystation holds life of some sort, and humanity sorts it into five main groups.

Simple life, such as bacteria and low-intelligence fauna, is found on plenty of moons and planets. Many scientists with the means charter flotillas to explore newly discovered alien ecosystems, and some of these finds become contested for their rare minerals or exotic plants and animals.

Intelligent primitives, species that have never left their own planet, are reasonably common. If they can be reasoned with, their world may become a protectorate of one of the solar nations. Some are traded with, others are left alone, and a few are even uplifted by human factions for their own ends. The Tishpak raised on Phobos are arguably one such case. Most, though, are hostile or impossible to talk to.

Void-locked aliens are what humanity was before it found the waystations. They may control their whole solar system, with small empires across its moons and planets, but without the waystations they are marooned there, and humanity is in no hurry to hand them the technology to compete. Their systems usually become roadblocks or no-go zones in the Web, though a few have become protectorates of human nations.

Wayfaring aliens can travel the waystations and are in open competition with humanity. They have their own aims and their own flotillas, and are sometimes trade partners and sometimes enemies of the human nations. Like humanity, they are split into many factions, nations or tribes, though humans rarely grasp the nuances.

Extinct aliens are civilisations that destroyed themselves long ago, one way or another, and many of them seem to have built the waystations. Sometimes a dead planet tells of a civilisation lost to some great tragedy. More often, though, a species digitised itself before it ever left its home world. It ceased to exist in reality and now lives out digital lives on a dead planet, where colossal data obelisks stand like tombstones in a long-forgotten cemetery.

Aliens met so far

Void whales (Mobys, Jonahs): See Void whales below.
The Tide (wayfaring): See The Tide below.
Scrapfish (and other names): See Scrapfish below.
Void keepers: See The void keepers below.
Ursine natives (intelligent primitives): Low-tech inhabitants of a lush jungle moon rich in precious rare minerals, defended by a NOVA detachment. "NOVA is always willing to protect vulnerable alien species and their natural resources."
The Tishpak: Lizard-like intelligent primitives of a desert moon claimed by Mars. See The Tishpak.
Ancient alien artefacts: Smuggled to Sol to sell on the black market.
Hostile alien fleets, physics-defying celestial phenomena and the remains of ancient civilisations: All met by the deep-void scientific expedition.
Alien technology in human hands: The fold drive and the waystations, and possibly the Kingdom of Saturn's shields.

The Tide

A wayfaring alien species.

The Tide are a widespread race of aquatic aliens who travel the waystations as humanity does. They look something like a cross between a crab and an octopus. Like a crab, a Tide must shed its shell as it grows, leaving it soft and delicate. Rather than wait for a new shell to harden, it seals itself inside powered armour, which it wears until it outgrows it. Over time its new shell grows into the armour, until the metal suit, fit for water or land, effectively becomes the shell itself.

The Tide don't speak. They communicate through tentacles that pass information electrically by touch, or through pulsing colours on their armour. Yet they are obsessed with sound and what many believe is their music. They eat their dead, it seems to be part of the funeral rites. They seem to change sex as they mature: the larger ones appear to be their version of female, and the smaller ones more likely some sort of male, though much more study is needed. In battle they are armoured monsters the size of battle tanks, and their ships are filled with water, like great armoured aquariums.

The Tide are utterly alien. Since the two species can barely communicate, most meetings with humanity turn hostile, though there have been a few rare peaceful exchanges.

Void whales

Simple life on a colossal scale. No single formal name: voidsmen call them void whales, Mobys, Jonahs, Ahabs, Pequods or Nantuckets.

Not every alien is a civilisation. Void whales are colossal living animals, as big as ships, that drift through space in family pods. Somehow they can fold, though only through the waystations, and a pod will usually stay in one system for a long while before moving on. They nest in features of the void, such as debris fields and gas clouds.

Voidsmen have many names for them, most borrowed from the whaling tales of ancient Earth. "Mobys" is the common, almost affectionate one. "Jonahs" recalls the man swallowed by a whale, and is used most often where settlements have vanished. "Ahabs" names the hunted after the hunter, because these whales sometimes hunt back. "Pequods", after a doomed whaling ship, is for the things that sink you, and a pod's nesting ground is often called a "Nantucket".

A pod lives much like a family of clownfish from earth’s seas. The largest whale is the female, and only she bears young. The second largest is the male. Around them swim many smaller, sexless members, along with even smaller young. When the male dies, one of the sexless whales grows and changes sex to take his place. When the female dies, the male grows to become the new matriarch.

Void whales are not normally hostile, but they will attack if they feel threatened, and many a voidsman tells of whole settlements vanishing while whales nested nearby. Autopsies have revealed something stranger still: their bodies are riddled with huge parasites, worms the size of humans. Some astrobiologists suggest the worms are a symbiotic species. Nobody knows for certain.

Scrapfish

Simple life of a mechanical kind, or something like it.

Drifting through the void are schools of large machines that eat wrecks and alien tech. They seem unintelligent, almost like automated robot animals: they drift through a solar system, strip debris, and when the school is big enough they can fold through a waystation too. Each is about the size of a human escort, and they travel in packs. A dense enough school can even serve as cover for ships. Normally they leave working ships alone and only eat wrecks and scrap, but some go rogue and hit live ships in packs, almost like piranhas. Voidsmen call them Scrapfish, Remoras, Gnashers, Hullmites, or simply the Feast.

The void keepers

Of all the dangers of the deep void, few are feared like the void keepers. What they are, nobody can say for certain. Some believe they are an automated defence system guarding the waystations. Others think they were once an alien species that turned itself into machines. They have never communicated with humanity in any way, and they are relentlessly hostile, attacking any human settlement they find. Whether they count as a species under Sovereign law, which forbids destroying any alien race entirely, is a question few commanders stop to consider.