The Serpentine A Heart of Darkness

In the Common Era year 2113, Major Maximillia Brandenburg activated humankind’s first rendition of a differential gravity drive, momentarily exiting the multiverse and consequently cheating the physical barricade prohibiting faster-than-light travel. Thereby, she made possible exploration of the cosmos within the constraints of human timescales. Shortly thereafter, humanity began to fill their empty galaxy, one habitable planet at a time. Of course, nothing is so simple, really, and the one otherwise unmanageable constraint upon this form of travel drastically affected its utility. Differential gravity is found only on the fringes of a galaxy-sized mass. While the journey from one flexure-point to another could be accomplished rather quickly outside the galaxy, the journey from there to a habitable planetary destination within the galaxy often exceeded the length of a single human lifespan. To ease this toll of human aging, where possible, humankind established flexure-points near the orbit of artificially terraformed though otherwise dead orphan-planets – extra-galactic bodies tossed out of their originating solar systems by rogue solar phenomena. Ultimately, through the course of the next three hundred years, the bulk of human travel and interstellar commerce would transpire between these established flexure-points along a cosmic highway called “The Serpentine”.Insatiable as always, humankind's thirst for fuel only expanded with the advent of interstellar travel along this sprawling cosmic highway. To supply its gluttonous demands, the Company long ago dispatched ruthless agents to the galactic frontier with a single focus: procure fuel without regard for consequence or cost. When humanity encountered sentient, spacefaring aliens for the first time, the conflict quickly turned bloody, and now one rogue agent defends the frontier against ravenous alien hordes. Trillions of desperate citizens have come to depend upon him for survival. Unfortunately for them all, the stress and loneliness of his extremely isolated post eventually unraveled his mind. Consequently, he has become psychopathically insane. To restore order, a small troupe of mercenaries must hunt him down amid the galaxy's darkest heart and destroy him, but he has long harbored a deadly secret that threatens the safety of every living human being in the Milky Way.