Background to the Cortii

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

The Cortii are mercenaries. As we meet them in the Cortii series, they’re the descendants of a mercenary cult that has existed for more than eight millennia, since the pre-spaceflight era. As far as the humanoid population goes, the Cortii are deeply embedded in the popular consciousness.

'War, therefore, is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.' ~Carl von Clausewitz

The Cortii have been bodyguards, armies, spies, and assassins. They’ve toppled governments, supported rebellions and been hired to support – and prevent – some of the greatest crimes in humanoid history. They’re banned from active recruiting in Federated Planets Alliance space, the Nasdari government is wary of them, and the Atari ignore them unless or until popular opinion becomes vocal on the topic.

Beyond that, all the Cortiian fighters, the deriani, who are the only members of the force that the public has much to do with, have a mandatory minimum telepathic rating. Humanity as a species has a high percentage of members with some minimal extra-sensory talent, but that percentage is still a fraction of the general population, and there is widespread social distrust of those with some extra-sensory ability.

The majority of the humanoid governments embrace a peaceful ethos. FPA and Atari citizens, certainly in the central planets, see violence as anathema. However, at their borders, their armed forces are frequently engaged. Beyond that, information gathering, executive protection, and shipping security are still required, and the majority of central worlds citizens are unable to shake their early conditioning against violence. This means that the Cortii are, depending on cultural background and personal inclination, either a source of covert fascination, a menace to public security and personal privacy, or a necessary evil.

The Cortii are not the only mercenary force in space; there are a number, ranging from informal groups working highly localised missions to organisations that rival the Cortii in numbers, if not reach. Most of the other mercenary forces of note are drawn from frontier worlds and space outposts, and are by and large fully human, which the Cortii are not.

Every Cortiian, whether they meet the requirements to join the ranks of the deriani or not, is physically based on an artificially grown body. The historic intent was to have the Cortiian frontline force be based entirely on clone-type, replaceable fighters. However, despite several millennia of research, limitations on these artificially grown fighters remain. Most problematic from the point of view of the Cortii is a lack of ability to think beyond pre-defined strategy – or, to put it bluntly, they’re deficient in crazy.

The Councils of the magaii, the commanding elite of every Cortiian Base, therefore adapted the strategy. Rather than a fully artificial fighter, they use the artificially grown bodies to ensure that basic standards are met, but overlay those bodies with a partial genetic map and a personality and memory imprint from people showing a promising mix of attributes. Most of the time, the people from whom these imprints are taken are not aware it’s been done, and standard practice is to use children below the age of twelve, both because social conditioning has not yet been fully absorbed and because any stray memories of the process the donors may keep are more likely to be discounted. On rare occasions, the Cortii will accept adult volunteers, who are told that they will undergo genetic modification. However, the same technique is used on those adults, and the original bodies are disposed of.

The Cortii are additionally the only mercenary force also recognised as an independent government. Cortiians are not citizens of whichever spatial sector their Base happens to be sited in, and the Councils function entirely autonomously of local government. Attempts to bring Bases forcibly under the authority of the local government have historically never been met with success. Unsubstantiated rumour indicates that all Base Councils report to a central Council, but if this is the case, the secret of where this Council is housed is one of the best-kept in space.

The Cortii work on a set structure, which is the same on every Base. Each Base is commanded by an Inner Council, composed of five magaii, and an Outer Council of twenty-five. They are protected, and their orders are enforced, by a unit known as the akrushkari, whose numbers are variable but whose role is always the same. Directly beneath the Councils are unit commanders, or Cortiorai, each commanding a Cortia of twenty-four deriani. Cortii are further split into five sub-units known as Cantai, each under the orders of a Cantara, who reports directly to their Cortiora. Canta units can and do work independently of the rest of the Cortia for long periods of time, and solo assignments for individual deriani are not unknown. For those who don’t meet the required standards to join the deriani, Cortiian Bases require specialists in everything from inorganic chemistry to psychology to information infrastructure. These specialists rarely leave their home Bases; however, Cortiian citizenship is irrevocable, and deserters are hunted down until death can be proved beyond all doubt. There is no way to resign from the Cortii.

Spatial politics and the Cortii

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

...because you really can't call it geo-politics when it concerns a sizeable chunk of the galaxy.

Setting borders

Borders in space are tricky bastards, because you're defining a volume rather than an area. Setting borders in space is the art of picking your battles wisely, and the Cortii have been making a very healthy income from variations on that theme for a number of millennia.

To define the problem a little more precisely, habitable worlds are light years apart. In multiple directions. Add to that the fact that the deepspace drive used by most of the species in what we're going to loosely term 'civilised space' essentially bypasses normal space and goes from Point A to Point B, and 'border' becomes an increasingly stupid proposition.

It's all about location

It's possible to track a ship while it's in realspace, via any beacon or station or satellite close enough to get a ping off it. It's possible to eyeball the thing by actually physically getting it in scanner crosshairs. Locating a ship in deepspace has long been the wet dream of various militaries, and so far no one's reliably managed it.

This means that while spatial governments will map by sector (volume), the real power lies in the inhabited systems. No one in their right minds is going to take a deepspace jaunt to nothing, so logically, they'll pop out somewhere. When they do, they'll show up on a locator grid - as something. Just because the Ore Scavengerdropped into deepspace by Sector 14 Outstation doesn't mean you won't get the Peace of the Starsarriving in Core-Galax orbit. Juggling IDs is a favourite sport of any pilot who prefers to keep their business their business, and the more generic the hull and load-out, the better it works, because as long as the various militaries are foiled in their aim to track a ship through a deepspace jump, the more they focus on making a positive ID at Point A and Point B.

Snags with spatial exploration

Humanoid expansion began from what is now known as Central Worlds. There are four worlds that claim the honour of being the original human homeworld, and while it's pretty obvious which one actually is, sharing the honour - and the expenses - has historically been the way to go. The four worlds in question are spread across three systems, all within ten to twenty light years of each other. They were all human-settled before the first deepspace colonisation wave, they're all rocky planets more or less in the habitable zone, and if one or more of them was terraformed, it was successful enough, and long enough ago, that ruling it out of contention for the honour of being a homeworld would be tricky to prove. Also, not really in anyone's best interests.

Once deepspace drive got off someone's to-do list and into actual use, there were a series of colonisation waves. Given astronomical distances, untried tech, and an excess of optimism, most of the first Colonial Fleet vanished into the silence between stars and was never heard of again. Every so often, someone either terminally lost or scouting frontier worlds comes across a drifting wreck, a primitive humanoid settlement with no logical connection to the rest of the planet's biosphere, or a sizeable crater somewhere with odd trace elements welded into it.

Secession and profit

The Second Colonial Expansion was a bit more modest, a lot better controlled, and formed the basis of society as it is today. From Central Worlds, scoutships were sent to most of the nearby systems, looking for habitable planets, planets that could be terraformed, or systems that were completely uninhabitable but which had enough resources to make an artificial habitat worthwhile.

Because the kinds of people willing to head out into the void and try to start some kind of settlement generally have a strong independent streak, Central Worlds stopped getting much more than lip service from a number of their further colonies no more than a few generations to a few centuries later. Their desire to do something about this led to one of the earliest interstellar deployments of Cortiian forces on record, often on every side in the conflict.

When the dust settled into a stable orbit, Central Worlds and about fifteen systems formed the Federated Planets Alliance (at that point, pretty much a cake-slice-shaped sector of space with Central Worlds at the narrow end). The Atari Sector had hung onto a deep arc of territory fanning out and down from that narrow end, and the Hejjin'in Empire had claimed a chain of systems from Central Worlds that was more a crooked line heading out at at oblique angle to Galactic core than an actual sector.

Cortiian expansion

Since exploring brave new worlds is a chancy business even when people aren't trying to shoot your ass off, all three of the governments periodically hired Cortiian units aboard to do their dirty work. Above and beyond those contracts, the Cortii had a workable fleet, and turned the fees they made into more ships. During this period, they gained their first footholds in the various sectors, in exchange for services, or, not uncommonly, because they settled somewhere and proved far too expensive to dislodge.

Latecomers and interspecies alliances

The Nasdar Quadrant split off the Hejjin'in Empire about fifteen hundred years after the original split; in short, a do-over of the initial Sector War. The military was heavily concentrated in the outer borders of the Hejjin'in territory, and when they hit critical mass of younger offspring sent to cool their heels in the outer systems, the military seceded from the Empire - very successfully.

The Kendazi Union is an even more recent addition to the humanoid governments. It's also the government with the strongest interspecies links, since it was an non-human species that negotiated a deal with the Atari to exchange workers able to tolerate conditions and extract resources in various systems Corewards for tech and rights to the planets.

Until the Kendazi alliance, relations with the various non-human species was patchy at best. The Atari and the Cortii historically had the best luck with establishing relationships, and this was more or less because both have a high incidence of the various Abilities in their populations. Cortiians have a mandatory telepathic minimum for anyone serving in an active unit, and the Atari, culturally, are the most receptive towards Abilities, Ability research, and training.

Very much in brief, communication is highly reliant on perception. Molecular structure may be universal, but how it's perceived and described turned out not to be, and early attempts at communication started a number of rifts. In some instances, mental contact turned out to be equally fatal, but usually only to the participants. By and large, the success rate was notably higher, something which eventually lead to the formation of the cumbersomely-named Independent Extra-Sensory Regulatory Organisation, where species is optional provided you have the Ability range in some Ability or other to deal with contact with other species without stroking out.

In short, ambition, aliens, expansion, and politics, oh my.

A Book Geek

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

Just what exactly would a book geek do, if one won the lottery?

Honestly, I might well start a bookstore. Except it would be an awesome bookstore. There would be a new section, a used book section, and there would be classes somewhere in book-binding, old-style press printing, and even manuscript illumination if I could find someone able to teach it. Papyrus-making. The works.

The bookstore part would look like a Hogwarts set, and there'd be tourist attractions like 'Print your own "WANTED" poster!' going on to lure people in and get them to buy books, read books, and play with books. There would be absolutely effing zero kitschy cushion displays and God-awful scented candles that smell of the wide-open chemical vats.

...I realised at this point in my daydream that I was probably a book geek. Possibly even a book junkie. Don't judge me.

I got hooked very young. I remember reading those truly terrible 'Learn to read' books from Ladybird - 'Peter and Jane saw a BUTTERFLY!!' is permanently scarred into my long-term memory from those - before my third birthday. I'd graduated to Barbar the Elephant and Wind in the Willows before age four, and George MacDonald Fraser and J.R.R. Tolkien by seven (explains a lot, if you think about it...).

Not completely illogically, one of my few fond memories of boarding school was the library. First, it was generally avoided and abhorred by the cool kids, and as a bonus, it was full of books. It was also in the oldest part of the school, and had been put together sometime in the 1800s. Some of the books dated from then as well. Before anyone asks, if there were ghosts I never saw them.

To keep the books that weren't actually antique, but were falling apart, in shape, a book binder would come in every so often, and open up a room which was normally locked. In there was all the paraphernalia needed to stitch and bind books, and if you showed a capacity to sit still and not break things, he would teach you book binding. Beyond the lure of being something to do with books that I hadn't known existed, book-binding also wasn't one of the school-approved 'hobbies' we had to spend 90 minutes doing on Saturday afternoons, like silk-painting, or photography. While it didn't get me out of those, it did interest me much more.

Shortly after I met the book binder (dayum, there should be a horror story in that line), I started surreptitiously writing. Very surreptitiously, in the back of classrooms as the balled-up bits of paper and flying elastic bands of an orderly academic environment ricocheted around me, and under my covers by torchlight after lights-out.

These days, I publish my books electronically, and most of my readers buy them electronically, but I've never quite lost that fascination with seeing a heap of pages turn into orderly sheaves, get stitched together, and gradually get turned into a book.

Help, I'm a pantser

...in the beginning, there was a thought.

And the thought would not go away.

And the thought took root and multiplied.

And people in meetings spake, and asked: what were you drawing in your notes?

And lo, you woke up in the night, and the thoughts bore fruit.

And the next day, you started writing and didn't stop for air.

Writing as a pantser is actually pretty much exactly like that. Especially when your characters happen to be elite mercenaries, with years of training in breaking down defences. Mine progress remarkably quickly from polite reminders that it's been a while since I wrote to sleep deprivation techniques.

But 75,000 words' worth?

Actually, yes, surprisingly easily. Most of my manuscripts, after all the various levels of edit have been applied, work out to 85 - 100K words. I have no idea how someone can sit down, figure out exactly what is going to happen in a book...and then write a full manuscript despite that. I write books because I want to find out what happens, and the only way I can do that is to start writing. Well, that, and it's the only reliable way to make the voices in my head shut up.

A lot of people figure that pantsers don't plan and outline because they're either lazy, and will never finish a book, or because they're inherently disorganised and their books will be chaotic.

Would it perhaps surprise you to know that J. R. R. Tolkien was a pantser?

I think it's highly appropriate, therefore, that a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien pretty much describes how I feel about writing: Bilbo's walking song.

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.”

But, as a pantser, how do you keep track?

Oh, I have some notes. But when I say 'some notes' I mean about a page and half of Times New 12pt, for things that keep showing up but I can't be bothered to devote brain-space to - Khyria's ID code is one of those things. Much easier to pull up a notes file, and copy and paste the darn thing. Then I don't drop consistency errors all over my readers, and I don't have to re-read my entire series again to track down one elusive reference.

Fine. I don't have to re-read my entire series often to track down one elusive reference. Happy?

Being a pantser does have one massive drawback. I hate SEO. I loathe it. If you want to write truly effective posts for SEO, or even something like a bio, you have to plan it. you have to have a list of keywords, and you have to have a system for getting them all in there without keyword stuffing.

I've compromised. That compromise is that I will never be great at SEO, but I will continue to enjoy writing.

Books and authors

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

...lying on my back on the library floor, staring blankly up at my bookshelves, I realised two things.

First: it's not hoarding if it's books; second, that I have a lot of series by female authors. Given all the unmitigated crap that occasionally hits the airwaves about 'women ruining science-fiction', and given the amount of sci-fi I read, it took me rather by surprise. I didn't, in fact, set out to collect books written by women authors. Actually, if I'm completely honest, unless I'm looking for some more of someone's work that I've already enjoyed, the author's name tends to be about the last thing about a book that I look at.

Generally, if someone's unwary enough to let me off my chain in a bookshop, my method of picking out books (yes, it's never 'a' book, kindly don't blaspheme) is to wander along the sci-fi and fantasy shelves, picking up random books that look interesting and reading the first few pages.

I like that first few pages, I buy the book - simple. If I like the rest of the book, when I've got it home and devoured it, then I'll take notice of the author - so that I can go and see what else they've written, and hang out in their metaphorical garden hedges watching to see when the next book may come out. Yes, I author-stalk. (Rabia Gale, I'm looking at you. W. Clark Boutwell, you too.)
 
From my unexpected vantage point on the floor (I was trying to clean - don't judge), for the first time in my life, I counted fingers and realised that, having used that method of book selection most of my life, I really do have a lot of books by women authors. C J Cherryh, Lilith Saintcrow, Anne MCaffrey, Dorothy Dunnett, Patricia Briggs, Rob Thurman, Michelle Sagara, Ann Aguirre, Laura Anne Gilman...I could keep going. I was almost relieved to come across half a shelf of Jack Campbell, a complete shelf and a half of Terry Pratchett (all hail to Sir Terry), a clump of Jack Higgins, the full Wheel of Time series, some Jim Butcher, a bit of Simon Green, and...yeah, I read a lot.

Basically, I like good writing, by which I mean a writing style that doesn't make me roll my eyes on page one, characters that aren't two-dimensional, and a plot that actually, well, has a plot. I don't select my books based on the shape of the author's genitalia.

Something that pisses me off no end is the sheer number of individuals (insert epithets of choice here, I'm a dirty-word intellectual trying hard to keep my blog mostly PG) going around claiming that 'men can't write fantasy' or 'women can't write science-fiction'. I call bullshit. J R R Tolkien, for example. C S Lewis. C J Cherryh, Octavia E Butler, Anne McCaffrey. I suffer violent urges when I read that J K Rowling is J K because someone told her that she'd sell fewer books as Joanne Kathleen Rowling.

I think at heart I feel that the only criteria that a book should be judged by is the quality of the writing. A good cover and a good blurb may well help to attract the reader's attention, but ultimately, you can have the best cover in the world, and unless that excerpt makes me want to read more, you're going back on the shelf.

How (not) to write a series - a pantser's guide

How not to plan

Definitely, at all costs, avoid the planning. With this one simple tip, a writer can avoid months or even years of worry, save themselves from the dreaded note cascade whenever the cat crosses the desk, and, best of all, begin writing sooner.

As award-winning authors Claire Buss and J C Steel can attest, it is hard to over-emphasise the savings in time spent not writing your next masterpiece this one piece of advice can provide. Please note, when we say ‘don’t plan’, we do indeed mean no series arc, no tedious deciding in advance whether your protagonist should have a mole somewhere interesting, and most certainly no poring over a map trying to figure out why cities that famous people are born in exist at the top of mountain plateaux with no nearby water.

Complicated things like these tend to take care of themselves. You had no plan for book one and everything worked out just fine. Repeat this method when writing subsequent books and in no time at all you'll have a multi-book series and maybe even a box set. Planning takes up valuable time when you could be inventing twenty new characters who bear no relation whatsoever to the main characters in your first book. It's important to keep things fresh and interesting.

Planning is one of the secret tools of procrastination. Authors who swear by it are really admitting to be closet-procrastinators and they probably don't even like cake.

 

How not to world-build

J C Steel maintains that it’s possible to learn everything you need to know about your characters and your world-building by climbing a mast, wedging yourself comfortably above the radar, and chatting with the voices in your head. Not only does it pass the time when the yacht isn’t going anywhere, but when you do this regularly, the character, the secondary characters, and the world they live in become so internalised that the entire setting and cast is ready for you when you reach deck level and reach for your pen (or keyboard, or magic wand, or inscription instrument of choice). Better yet, again, no notes required.

Health and safety tip: Of course, for the younger writer, it is important not to confess to anyone that you are, in fact, chatting with the voices in your head until you reach the local age of indiscretion. Otherwise adults (defined as those who have been doing it wrong longer) have a tendency to over-react.

There is no need to re-read your previous book(s) and re-familiarise yourself with the existing world you built. After all you wrote it in the first place and you never forget salient details, ever. By continuing to have regular chats with your characters you will have an in-depth understanding of their personality and why they react to things the way they do. Seeing as you have all this information at your fingertips it will become obvious to the reader as well, this is down to secret osmosis of thought. That elusive yet unique connection authors have with their readers which allows them, the reader, to understand every nuance, every subtlety and every hidden meaning. That connection is so strong there is no need to describe buildings, cities, infrastructure or even what your characters look like. All those world-building aspects come under planning and as stated previously, there is no need to get bogged down by any of that.

 

How to not delay the writing bits

So how does one get from chatting with the voices in your head to successfully writing a series? You may well ask. We feel that the key ingredient for this harks back to our very first piece of advice - don't plan - freeing up more time for actual writing. Bum on seat and fingers on writing implements is how the words are made to go. A pantser is, therefore, always at a near-infinite advantage. While the plotter is still working out whether using shell pink Post-It notes for the kinky scenes is too precious, the pantser has already powered through that all-important opening scene and is trying busily to get their characters to slow that duck down so they can write down the awesome one-liner someone yelled halfway through the last chase.

There is no need to worry about subsequent books making sense with regards to the entire series or indeed as stand-alone novels. Readers will, of course, read each book in the series in the correct order and will have already established their psychic link with your inner monologue and completely understand all the back story you've thought about and not yet written down. This means, again, the pantser wins at writing as they do not have to delay getting on with the actual writing.

Health and safety tip: We refer you to the great Oscar Wilde on the importance of making time for what is most important to you -“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”

 

How not to get buried in the details

Detailed descriptions are so last century. Your enlightened reader just wants the juicy bits, never mind sixteen pages detailing the lavish surroundings your average planner has constructed. Which by the way, took them two weeks to thrash out while you, the pantser, released four novellas.

It’s absolutely true, the Devil’s in the details. In case no one has ever imparted to you the key to lying successfully (and what is fiction writing, if not the art of lying to better convey meaning?), it is Keep It Simple, Stupid – also known in professional circles as the KISS and tell principle. By avoiding the wall covered in sticky notes, and the ensuing panic whenever the air, the cat, the offspring, or the summoned entity moves through the room, we have also successfully avoided not one, but two story-killers; the smothering alive of the story pacing in irrelevant detail, and the trapping yourself in a plot web of such intricacy that the temptation to disprove the old adage that the pen is mightier than the sword is put to extreme test.

 

How not to listen to advice on how to write

Last but not least (by far not least) it is vitally important to ignore other people telling you how you should write. What works for them is highly unlikely to work for you, and as we’re looking at not just a flash fiction piece, a novella, or a single book, but the writing of an entire series...it is extremely important to settle on a method that works for you over weeks, months, years, and even more importantly, a method that doesn’t get in the way of your writing, but which facilitates it. So planners - plan to your little heart’s content and pantsers - blag it all the way!

The related ability to ignore people, no matter what the topic, is another that we highly recommend to aspiring series authors. In fact, it is a skill that will generally make your life better all around. Most great artists became famous long after they were dead, so it stands to reason if they’d listened to the people telling them how bad they were while they were alive, they would never have persevered until the very end.

 

Meet the authors

Claire Buss: 'Books and cake.'

Claire Buss is a science fiction, fantasy & contemporary writer based in the UK. She wanted to be Lois Lane when she grew up but work experience at her local paper was eye-opening. Instead, Claire went on to work in a variety of admin roles for over a decade but never felt quite at home. An avid reader, baker and Pinterest addict Claire won second place in the Barking and Dagenham Pen to Print writing competition in 2015 setting her writing career in motion.

You can follow her on Twitter @grasshopper2407 and visit her website www.cbvisions.weebly.com for more information about Claire and her writing.

J C Steel: ‘Knives, spaceships, and dirty fighting – who says a mercenary cult can’t be fun?’

Born in Gibraltar and raised on a yacht around the coasts of the Atlantic, I’m a writer, martial artist and introvert. In between the necessary making of money to allow the writing of more books, I can usually be found stowing away on a spaceship, halfway to the further galaxy.

Find out more about the author and the series at jcsteelauthor.com.

Etymology Excavation: quixotic

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

What is etymology, and why are you excavating it?

Etymology is like the archeology of a language (definition: the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history).

In this series of posts, we're going to look at some of the English phrases, like 'at full tilt', 'toe the line', 'when push comes to shove' that are commonly used, and have an interesting history - and that people often get wrong.

Seems as if once you start a good thing, the ideas just keep rolling. Today's excavation concerns the word 'quixotic'.

It's a fun dig. Let's start off with the dictionary definition as used today, courtesy of the Cambridge English Dictionary: 'having or showing ideas that are different and unusual but not practical or likely to succeed'.

The origin of the term dates back to 1605, and the work of fiction written by Don Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. It's more commonly known in English as Don Quixote. It's a pretty lengthy story, but the basic idea concerns a nobleman (you guessed it, Don Quixote) whose brain has slipped a few vital gears and who thinks he's a knight in the chivalric tradition. Amongst his antics are included tilting at windmills, which he mistook for giants.

As a point of general trivia, he names his long-suffering horse 'Rocinante', also the name given to the Mars ship used by James Holden and his crew in the TV series 'The Expanse'.

Quixotic, and quixotically, are words which I feel deserve more use than they get. They also have a wide range of definitions; I used the Cambridge one as it sums it up well, but the word can be applied for anything from 'odd' to 'quirky' to 'flaky' (in the sense of someone not to be relied on).

Colonisation fleets: Successful, semi-successful, and completely unsuccessful

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

Colonisation and the Cortii

Given the generally cold and occasionally fissionable-hot relationship between most of the humanoid governments and the Cortii, it may not be immediately obvious that there were Cortiian units on a lot of the early colony ships. And then, if you think about it a bit more...humanoid governments had been hiring Cortii to do their dirty work since long before the colonisation waves, and dealing with new things is inherently risky. Having some heavily-armed, survival-trained, and cynically-minded mercenaries aboard to drop out of the airlock first can pre-empt so many problems.

'A testing environment solves many problems.'~Training of a Cortiian

Initially, there were the interstellar drives - sub-lightspeed, because lightspeed, increase in mass to infinity, etc., etc. From whichever of the Central Worlds was the original homeworld (no one really wants to solve that argument), exploration ships took the long trip at somewhere between half and two-thirds of light-speed to other rocky planets in the original solar system, and set up bases, experimented with air scrubbing, water recycling, and food production until they got good at it, and finally took the sideways step into terraforming - with more and less successful results.

From there, with a lot of the basic experimentation done, colony ships were sent to nearby solar systems. Since absolutely no one really wants to settle once and for all which of the four Central Worlds was 'the' Central World, stick a finger in the hologram on whichever you like. Those ships also had Cortiians aboard.

At some point after that, researchers stopped banging their heads on trying to solve infinite mass versus propulsion, and had a breakthrough that resulted in point-to-point travel, or as it's more commonly known, deepspace drive.

This resulted in the First Colonisation Fleet, which would fall firmly into the 'unsuccessful' category of colonisation attempts.

'In the hands of a fool are all things foolish.'~Sayings of the Wise

The First Colonisation Fleet

Given primitive humanoids and their tendency to breed indiscriminately, it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that a lot of the incentive behind the development of the original deepspace drive was to solve a massive overpopulation problem. Population-wide contraception actually preceded it by a few generations, but by that point all the Central Worlds were pretty much teetering on the point of not being able to support their populations.

With the advent of the deepspace drive came another massive incentive: hail conquering heroes, go forth and be granted as much surface space as you can possibly manage. The governments of the time didn't need to resort to deportations - they had more volunteers than they could build hulls and suspension tanks for. Private initiatives sprang up across Central space, building deepspace ships and offering space aboard.

Records of the time, given the sheer numbers of parties involved, are contradictory, but somewhere between six hundred and thirteen hundred experimental ships vanished into deepspace over a period of a hundred years, each carrying several hundred to several thousand aboard.

Even some of these had Cortii aboard, due largely to hazard bonuses and pre-payment contracts. Even the healthiest culture of cynicism is soluble in enough credit.

However, given experimental drives and the fact that the numbers of ships leaving Central Space in every direction vastly exceeded the number of planets about which long-distance research and exploratory probes had more to say then 'we're pretty sure there is something there', only a fraction of that First Colonial Fleet actually resulted in stable, high-tech colonies.

Miners and scout ships in remote locations still occasionally trip over drifting wrecks, and first contact teams have discovered several humanoid populations on outer-system planets with some interesting gaps in their fossil records, a really big impact crater, or stories of ships that carried wisdom from a distant land.

'Coincidence is the crutch of optimism.'~Training of a Cortiian

The Second Colonial Expansion

...might fall into the semi-successful category. Much better controlled, with destinations that at least rated a definite maybe on being terraformable, or stable enough to support a station habitat, twenty systems were selected for the initial wave, reconnoitred on a detail level, and finally approved for colonisation.

Not to mention, the deepspace drive had had a couple more centuries of fine-tuning. All twenty ships made it, one got blown away by defences the probes had missed, two turned out to be station prospects rather than terraforming prospects, but overall it worked. Most of those twenty ships carried one or more Cortii aboard.

In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that the defences the probes had missed were in fact Base Zero; the Cortii had a sizeable fleet of their own and substantially less bureaucracy. The Central Worlds government declined to believe that there was a Cortiian base already in the system, but their ship went in heavily armed nonetheless. In the event, not nearly heavily enough.

Those colonies, in turn, spread, and split over time into the various political factions that form the basis of current Cortiian employment - pardon me, today's civilisation.