E.S. Raye

About eighteen months ago, I shared a post about the main setting of Gas Giant Gambit: Las Ráfagas, the fuel mining outpost where all the action takes place.

Now I want to pull back a bit, and introduce you to the larger world, in which Las Ráfagas is just an insignificant speck: the Arm.

The Arm

In Star Wars, you have “the galaxy.” In Firefly, it was “the ‘verse.”

In Gas Giant Gambit, it’s “the Arm”–shorthand for the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.

Most space-westerns envision the “western” parts of their setting pretty literally. On Firefly, they always seemed to land on desert or prairie planets. The Mandalorian did a lot of that too, especially in the first season or two.

On the other hand, most hard sci-fi views space through the lens of sailing, with “ships,” and “ports,” and “docking,” etc. This is so common that Firefly leaned into this as well, with “boat” as a slang-term for a small, space-faring vessel.

I wanted something more unique, so I split the difference. Rather than have a desert planet, I made space a metaphor for “The West.” I saw the void between solar systems not as a deep and wide sea, but as the prairies and deserts of the American Southwest–the harsh, deadly environment that isolated communities and made travel difficult and perilous.

In Gus’s world, humans have created engines that can break the light-barrier. But unlike Star Trek, their space-going vessels are still relatively slow when compared to the vast distances of this interstellar desert.

So, in the grand scheme of the galaxy, the humans of this story haven’t really gone that far.

There are many “Old Colonies” within a fifty lightyear radius of Earth, and then a smattering of colonies reaching out along the Orion Arm, beyond the Cygnus Rift (a band of dark interstellar dust we can see from Earth, about 300-700 lightyears from us) to the frontier in the Cygnus X star cluster, about 1,500 lightyears away.

Think of the Old Colonies as the East Coast of the United States, the Cygnus Rift as the Mississippi River, and the Cygnus X colonies as California during the mid-to-late 1800s. And crossing that distance on the Arm takes about as long as it did to cross North America at that time: weeks, even months, depending on your mode of transport.

And the farther from the Old Colonies you get, the more distant and rugged the outposts become. All save for Cygnus X, which, like San Francisco in the 1800s, is new, bustling, and exciting. For decades, pioneers have followed the Cygnus Trail–a path of settlements and outposts–to their new homes there.

Also like the (earlier) 1800s, there is no reliable means of fast/instant communication across these incredible distances. Messages can only travel as fast as the person carrying them.

But now, there’s a railroad–so to speak–being built to connect them.

Pulse-Rail Travel

In an effort to connect people and resources between the Old Colonies and Cygnus X more readily, a new mode of transportation has been devised and, at the time of Gas Giant Gambit, has been implemented–though not yet fully: the pulse-rail train.

Not only do these new pulse-rail trains travel at speeds that far outpaces mount-level (analogous to horseback) and carriage-level vessels, they can carry far more passengers to the frontier. Several pulse-rail stations have already been built along the Cygnus Trail from both ends, with only Midpoint Station in the Rift still under construction.

While this development represents a leap forward in technology, it also presents economic challenges to those who rely on the Cygnus Trail traffic. The pulse-rail engines use a new, quantum fuel, and with rail travel intensifying, demand for rubidium-87–the fuel that Las Ráfagas mines and relies on–is cratering.

Extraterrestrial Life on the Arm

I’m not going to to dive too far into this topic now, because the explanation for it is far deeper than Gas Giant Gambit explores, and I have some big plans for this concept in the future, but:

Yes, there is non-human life on the Arm, but it is sparse on the Earth side of the Cygnus Rift, somewhat more dense on the Cygnus side of Rift, and denser-still within the Rift itself.

But even all that said, it is rare.

However, none of these civilizations are at a similar technological level as Gas Giant’s humans. Again, somewhat like the US and the indigenous nations of North America. The feeling humans have toward alien life is also similar.

The non-human species that appears in Gas Giant Gambit is the Deiopeans–short, bipedal, spider-like people. Their technology is roughly similar to what ours was in the 1960s (with a specific caveat the story explains) and represents the most common level of scientific advancement for non-human species on the Arm.

War on the Arm

And finally, when we join Gus on the Arm, we enter a galaxy in conflict.

Mirroring the American Civil War, the Confederate Colonies of Orion (CCO) have seceded from the United Colonies of Earth and her Territories (UCET) and war has broken out between the two factions.

As with all wars, the reasons are complicated and varied, but, like all wars, boils down to a single concept: are robs sentient?

The UCET says yes.

The CCO says no.

But to many outside the Old Colonies, especially on the far side of the Rift, the war feels far away and inconsequential to their everyday lives.

This is certainly true for Gus and the people of Las Ráfagas.

But what feels far away may, in fact, already be at their doorstep.