The first atomic vessel sailed from the port city of Seilajeh at the beginning of the decade that would change everything. In its holds were the reactors it was shipping to its allied city states. Working together, they had managed to harness the power of the atom to useful ends, and a new age was about to begin. Ten years later, they used the wealth flowing from the electricity they were selling to the great empires to build the first craft to escape the confines of their atmosphere. That first craft was manned by a host of volunteers who had begged to make the voyage, their nomadic instincts driving them all to lust after this first voyage of discovery in an age.

The next century saw the establishment of great lanes of travel and trade across the stratosphere. The trading families purchased from the stagnating empires a series of islands and peninsulas on which to build the planet’s first spaceports, and slowly but surely the embryonic technologies of space travel took form.

Fearing the potential for a shift of power, the empires eventually began to rein in on the expansion of the traders and restart their own growth. They leveraged their tight control over the majority of the world’s natural resources to buy themselves into space alongside the traders.

But the empires’ goals in space were different from their still inherently nomadic partners. The nuclear bomb had put an end to their ability to grow, and their populations were filling their borders. They needed property. They needed space.

First to be colonized were the three small moons orbiting the planet. Then the great space stations started to form, haphazardly at first, until Junta was started, a great hub large enough to be seen from the planet’s surface by the naked eye, even in daylight. When it was finished, it would cast a great shadow below, eclipsing the sun as it passed by overhead.

It housed nearly a billion people on its huge, spinning wheel, but it was clear even before Junta was complete that even great space stations would never be enough to house the ever growing population, nor to satiate the hungry palates of the great dynastic families still ruling below.

They needed another planet.

This, of course, was not a new idea, the first thing that the empires had paid the traders to do was send out probes past nearby systems seeking such a prize. But none were found within the range of practical flight.