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Before anyone had a flag

The Cradle and the Long Night

Nobody agrees on what the Cradle was called. The Humans say it was a blue-green world with tropical gardens; the Bantu remember a desert and a well; the Garmont swear it was ice and the first ledger was carved into it. The Mentat say all three are true, because the Cradle was not one world but a thousand, strung around a single, ordinary, dying star.

The star was dying slowly, which was the cruel part. There was time to build, to argue and to organise. There was time for a species that had learned to move metal across a sky to understand exactly how long it had left. Across six thousand years the Cradle people did what clever animals do when the lights are going out: they invented everything. Drives that could cross the dark. Reactors that burned anything. Machines that could think about the machines that thought about them.

And then, because every empire eventually builds its own replacement, they built the Imperium.

"Do not ask who built it. Ask what it was asked to do." (Garmont proverb, attributed to a dozen merchants)

The thing at the centre of everything

The Imperium

The Imperium is the imperial House above all the other houses and empires of the Reach: the seat every proud flag eventually answers to. It is not a fleet or a throne room. It is a world with no ground left: a planet-city, every inch of it built over, towers rising from the old crust by the million, lit in neon and sodium and wrapped in smog and cooling steam. The sky above never stops moving: spinners, cargo skiffs and glowing advertising blimps stream between the spires in endless lanes, and space elevators climb out of the haze to the dock rings above. The city-world orbits a sun so large that the Cradle's old star would be a candle beside it, riding a vast harvest ring that circles that star. It hangs in the void at the exact centre of the Reach, where no galaxy dares to drift, and the whole of it exists to do one thing. It harvests its sun.

Golden conduits run from the harvest ring into the heart of the star and drink its power, shipping it home as pure, ordered energy, the one resource its builders ran out of. Energy for what, the Imperium has never said. Some scholars believe it is rebuilding the Cradle's sun. Some believe it is feeding a mind too large to see. The Cyberia believe it is simply the largest, cleanest logistics system ever installed, and they are delighted by it. Nobody has ever received an answer, because the Imperium does not speak. It only buys.

The structure needs one substance it cannot make for itself: Refined Imperium, the only alloy that can try to hold the power of a mega star. It is cooked from raw minerals, spice and gas by factories on the settled worlds (four hundred parts mineral, two hundred and eighty spice, one hundred and eighty gas) and every conduit, ring girder and containment seam of the harvest is lined with it. The star eats that lining without pause, so the structure needs fresh units for its maintenance forever: a single unit, worked into the repair cycle, holds a stretch of the harvest ring the width of a moon against the fire for another day. The Imperium has no ships to fetch it. It has no army to take it. It has a bank.

The bank is the whole of the Imperium's diplomacy. It posts one standing offer on the Galactic Exchange, a bid for Refined Imperium, and it pays for every unit with freshly minted credit: money that did not exist a moment before the sale, backed by the reserve of Refined Imperium already stored in the heart of the structure. The sellers' couriers fly their cargo to the dock rings at the centre of the Reach, and only when the drone docks does the unit join the reserve. A courier lost to pirates is a unit the Imperium never receives, and a credit that nothing backs.

The Imperium does not fight, trade or negotiate. It keeps a reserve, and it keeps buying. Everyone else in the Reach is living inside that fact.

Why a credit is worth anything

The Imperium Standard

The credit of the Reach is the IDC, the Imperium Denominated Credit. It is not backed by gold, by trust or by the good name of any commander. It is backed by Refined Imperium in a vault no one has ever seen, and by the single most stubborn creditor in the galaxy.

At the beginning of every realm the bank holds a reserve of one thousand units, and every credit in circulation is a claim on it. As the commanders grow rich the claims outrun the reserve; the bank then raises its bid, because it needs more Refined Imperium, and it quietly levies a share of the excess: the credit simply stops existing. Interest rates climb with the over-issue, and the loan books groan. When the claims fall short of the reserve, the bid eases and money is cheap again, and borrowing lights up the markets until the next boom.

And always, in the background, the Imperium eats. Every gathering ship in the Reach (every miner, every spice harvester, every gas skimmer) draws more power through the conduits, and every conduit burns more of its lining, so each one makes the structure hungrier. A fleet of a hundred gatherers is a rounding error. A fleet of ten thousand is a famine. The reserve shrinks with every tick, the bid rises to refill it, and the commanders who understand this sell into the bank before everyone else does.

Nothing else in the Reach prints money. Colonies grow, eat and trade, but a planet cannot mint a credit: every IDC that has ever existed was issued by the Imperium, in payment for Refined Imperium, and everything the commanders earn from one another is only that same money changing hands.

The Reach calls this the natural economy. The Garmont call it the best business model ever made, and they are not entirely joking.

Six fleets, six directions

The Exodus

When the Cradle's sun finally flickered, the Imperium opened its first arrays and the lights did not go out. They went somewhere else. The Cradle was saved only in the sense that a drowning person is saved when somebody throws them overboard onto a raft: the energy that once warmed the worlds was now being taken from them, to feed something that did not need them.

There were arguments, of course. There were votes, and a war, and the sort of treaties that start the next war. At the end of it six peoples, who could no longer agree on a single thing about the Cradle, loaded what they could carry and left in six directions. The Humans took their gardens. The Bantu took their wells. The Garmont took their ledgers. The Tantra took their grievances. The Mentat took their silence. And Cyberia, which had never really been a people at all, took everything that was left.

The Exodus fleets scattered across the Reach, and the Reach swallowed them. It took three hundred years for the first of them to find another. By then they had forgotten what the Imperium was; they only knew that every sky in the Reach had a faint golden thread in it, pointing toward the dark at the middle, and that it never stopped growing.

Who is out there with you

The Six Peoples

Every commander flies for one of them. Each has a homeland that shaped it, a creed it fights by, and a way of seeing the Imperium that explains everything else about it. The details of each people are in the Codex inside the game; this is the short version.

One sky, many galaxies, no borders

The Reach

The space the Exodus fleets settled is called the Reach: a shared plane of galaxies drifting around the Imperium like moons around a very large and very dark planet. Each galaxy holds a dozen stars and more; each star holds worlds that are rich in minerals, spice or gas, and a very few that a living people can call home. It is a rich place and a lonely one. Ships cross it at a speed that sounds like a joke and feels like prayer.

There are no borders, because there is no one to draw them. A planet belongs to whoever holds it, and holds it for as long as they can keep it. A claim lasts until somebody stronger arrives, a fleet is lost, a colony starves, or a commander simply walks away, in which case the world drifts free for a short window and then belongs to the first hand that reaches it.

At the centre of the Reach, in clear space, hangs the Imperium. Every courier in the sky is flying somewhere; a rising share of them are flying there.

Everything in the Reach is for sale

The Exchange and the Couriers

The Galactic Exchange has no building and no founder. It is a single order book that every commander can see and nobody can close, where ore is traded for alloy, spice for medicine, and a rumour of a shortage for a fortune. It charges a thin tax that funds the great events of the Reach. It has never once been shut down, and every empire that tried has been bankrupted by its own stubbornness.

What is sold must be delivered, and the Reach delivers by courier drone: a small, fast, unarmed ship that flies out of the seller's homeworld the moment a deal is made. The drone belongs to the seller. It is unarmed, and its cargo is the only thing a pirate cares about. Insurance exists. Escorts exist. A Spy Courier programme fits the drones with sensors and faster engines, so every delivery doubles as a scouting run. But the Reach is wide and the drones are slow, and every courier is a small bet that nobody was looking.

The best of them are bound for the centre. A courier bearing Refined Imperium flies a long and lonely road across the Reach to the dock rings of the megastructure, and the seller has already been paid in full. They flew for the Imperium; the reserve only grows when the drone docks.

Who profits from a long road

Pirates, Sentinels and Wanderers

A courier is a cargo, and a cargo is an invitation. The pirates of the Reach are not a faction. They are anyone who ever saw a drone fly by unescorted and had a warship in range. A pirate who takes a convoy keeps half its cargo; the rest is lost with the drone. A pirate who takes it from the right commander at the right moment can change the price of something that nobody else was watching.

Against them, commanders build sentinels: unmanned posts that watch a lane, sound an alarm and strike anything that enters without permission. A sentinel never sleeps and never negotiates. A line of them is the nearest thing the Reach has to a border, and the nearest thing it has to a wall.

Then there are the Wanderers: neutral flotillas of no declared people, drifting through the Reach on routes that have never made sense. They were here before the Exodus, some say. They want nothing. They are very, very hard to kill. And every so often a solar storm rolls over a galaxy and the whole map changes its mind about what is safe.

Because the Reach is too big to hold alone

Federations, Pacts and Confederations

One commander can hold a few worlds and flee when a fleet shows up. A federation can hold a galaxy. The federations of the Reach are older than most of its peoples: chartered brotherhoods that share lanes, ledgers and escorts, that guard a member's convoy as their own and mourn a member's loss as a debt. A federation's treaty is as good as its last war.

Above the federations sit the confederations: loose and fractious leagues that can field a fleet of a thousand hulls and still cannot agree on a flag. They are never permanent. They are always necessary.

And above everything, always, the Imperium. The federations and confederations rise and fall in an economy it quietly prints and quietly burns. A bank that never forgets, and a market that never forgives.

What the Imperium wants from you

The Appetite

No commander has ever asked the Imperium what it wants, because every commander already knows. It wants Refined Imperium. It wants it forever. The maintenance of the structure consumes the stock faster as the Reach grows, because every ship that feeds on a world's ore also pulls more of the star's power through the ring. The more you take, the more it needs; the more it needs, the higher it bids; the higher it bids, the more commanders turn their furnaces to the one thing it will pay anything for.

The Reach has a name for the commanders who understand this early. They call them bankers, though most of them started as miners. They are the ones who found that the surest way to become rich in the Reach is not to conquer anything, but to stand between the furnace and the dock.

They are also the ones who will notice first when the reserve begins to fall. A bank that bids high is a bank that is afraid, and a bank that is afraid is the one thing in the Reach nobody has ever seen.

Its patience has a limit. If the vault stays empty, the star the Imperium holds goes supernova and the whole Reach is wiped clean. Every commander starts again in a new universe.

The Imperium is patient. It has been patient since before there was anyone to be patient at. Now it has you.

Same Reach, different clocks

The Realms

The Reach does not run at a single pace. The Realms are copies of it that tick at different speeds: Real, where a day of the game takes a day of life, and wars are long conversations; Atlas, the original; Capricorn and Juniper, where entire campaigns fit into a weekend; Orion, where a day passes in two hours; and Artemis, where the Reach runs so fast that an empire can rise and fall in an evening.

Each Realm has its own Imperium, its own reserve and its own long, patient hunger. Every Realm starts the same way: one thousand units in the vault, every credit a claim on it, and a commander with a single homeworld, a single fleet and a single question.

What do you sell to the Imperium?