Scattered along an arm of the Milky Way galaxy was hundreds of small human colonies. Each established on one of the handful of habitable planets Earth exploration had found. Travel between each colony and back to Earth was done by artificially created short range wormholes. When the distance between colonies was too large space stations were built to span the gaps. The stations floating in the emptiness of space with only an occasional transport vehicle using them to jump from one wormhole link to another.

  When Earth scientist created the first artificial wormhole it offered the dream of faster than light travel to the world. Excitement was high and the nations celebrated. Soon after they started to stake claims to all the stars and their planets sight unseen. As countries argued and fought over stars that probably weren’t even suitable for colonizing scientist kept working on the artificial wormholes.

  Scientist soon learned the limitations of the wormholes they created. Making one required an enormous amount of power, enough to power a large city. But that wasn’t the biggest problem; instead that was its size. The larger the wormhole the more power was needed. The power cost increased geometrically with the diameter of the wormhole. Making one large enough for a colony size spaceship to fit through would blackout a nation’s power grid.

  The wormholes were also easily affected by any gravitational or magnetic fields they traveled through. The longer the distance between endpoints the more the wormholes would be affected. The twisting and flexing stressed any object traveling through it and could on occasion collapse the wormhole. The first time a probe was sent directly to Alpha Century it arrived twisted into a pretzel. Keeping the wormholes limited to just a few light years allow for stable transition. This meant longer travel required multiple wormholes each one short cutting only a few light years of the trip.

  Keeping the wormholes to shorter distances required multiple jumps to reach most star systems. For these stations was setup every couple of light years. These way station became the frame work that travel between the planets relied upon. The stations were simple frameworks that were transported in small pieces and assembled on location.

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  Powerful fusion generators maintained the wormhole link points with capacitors to regenerating their wormholes if necessary. A small living area was attached for the station masters as care takers to live in. These caretakers were solely responsible for monitoring and if necessary regenerating local links. Interacting with passengers and crew transitioning through was rare. This gave the station masters a reputation for both oddness and antisocial behavior.

  The desire for exploration and colonization was strong and despite the cost Earth nations kept persisting in their exploration. After a few hundred years the routes to inhabitable planets stretched hundreds of light years out from Earth. Initially, travel on these routes uses small skinny ships with limited cargo capacity. These were built to minimize the wormhole diameter needed while still surviving the constantly shifting transit. This made the travel possible but still expensive and somewhat dangerous. That was until the invention of the star trains.

  Taken an idea from Earth’s history the star train was a connection of pod like container cars. Each car was loosely connected so the train could shift and bend as the wormhole flexed around it. In addition the front of the train generated a magnetic wedge that forced a wormhole to widen just long enough for the rest of the train to slip through behind it. To help smooth the journey a bit more each car was also provided with magnetic rails on four sides to keep it centered. The rails also helped keep their area of the wormhole from shrinking back to soon.

  Until the star trains made the travel cheaper colonist had only limited support from Earth. With the sometimes harsh environments and limited resources they turned to other methods to adapt. Genetic adjustments became popular. If the new planet was to cold people developed fur, if to hot then they became nocturnal with improved heat dispersal. At some point people started adding custom changes to their appearance to match cultural desires.