Sectors

In the former days of the Mandate, human space was generally divided into administrative sectors, each one the particular responsibility of some fragment of the ancient Terran bureaucracy. By the end of the Second Wave Colonization, these responsibilities were almost entirely fictitious, as the Mandate Fleet lacked the manpower necessary to exert Old Earth’s will on its scattered progeny. Even so, the centuries-old grind of bureaucratic procedure still dutifully labeled each fragment of distant space with its own identity.

Sectors were established on the basis of metadimensional proximity rather than simple spatial propinquity. Individual stars in a sector might be spreadout over dozens of light years, but the metadimensional currents between them were strong enough to allow quick travel among them, when a physically neighboring star might require impossibly lengthy drills through metadimensional space to reach it.

Settlers in these far sectors often adopted Mandate sector nomenclature simply out of convenience. The sectors that Fleet scout ships and far trader adventurers mapped out were composed of stars “close” enough to allow for trade with their ramshackle spike drives and colonial cargo haulers, and their density allowed for trade and assistance between nearby friendly worlds. Those with a more isolationist bent sought out sectors with far-scattered stars that couldn’t be bridged by the less sophisticated drives that most colonists used.

Most sectors had limited contact with other regions of space. While “bordering” stars could sometimes allow drills into a neighboring sector, large patches of unfriendly metadimensional space often strictly limited the available paths into or out of a sector. Some sectors were entirely inaccessible by anything but top-grade Mandate spike drives capable of leaping the broad gaps around them, and some entire regions were isolated by a few narrow bridgepoints into the cluster.