Prologue

The Hercules cluster consists of over 700,000 stars wheeling endlessly in a tight dance of gravity above the Milky Way galaxy. Formed over the past few billions of years, it has spawned uncountable stellar systems, planets and moons. The first generation stars still burn with their sullen red glow at the fringes of the cluster, while the bright blue-white young stars ignite anew near the core, gathering the dust and debris of the collapsed red giants that have either blown off their outer shells of gas, or blown up entirely. Stars upon stars, densely packed, in the relative terms of the mind bending distances between the stars for the rest of the galaxy, wheel and dance closely to one another, and the planets associated with these suns know days that never really turn to night. There are just too many Suns in the sky at all times, to let true darkness fall upon these worlds. Nighttime – is a relative term.
The densely packed stellar nurseries have long formed the familiar family of planets in dutiful tow around their gravitational field. Closely held rocky worlds, some with oceans of water, some without, and huge gas giants further away from their solar parents, sucking up the rest of the gas and dust from the original stellar nursery. The smaller rocky worlds collected the frozen ices of the comets and debris of the original stellar nebulae and many of them spawned deep and wide oceans of water, each shrouded in a protective blanket of steam. All of these worlds sprouted life in one form or another in due time, the random combination of amino acids, nucleic proteins and interactions with water and lightening always combined to form the slimes from which life formed, multiplied and then diversified. On each of these worlds multicellular creatures were not long to follow, then the first fish and invertebrates began to rule the seas and then the land. The sequence was common – in fact it happened whenever a rocky planet emerged in tact from its violent birth, cometary bombardment of ice and organic compounds, and subsequent warm and stable steam bath.
Within a few billion years for each of these stable worlds, intelligent life emerged, and the sequence of civilization building and decay, invention and destruction, peace and wars was at hand. Discovery led to science, and ultimately to exploration, first of their home planet, then to their stellar neighborhood, and ultimately to their nearest stellar neighbors. The Hercules Cluster community was born, established interstellar protocols and began to gaze longingly at the golden glow of the Milky Way glistening at their feet.....

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"Surrender to the Void...." J. Lennon

Nice story:)

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