The Legend of Earth (The Human Chronicles Saga -- Book 5) by T.R. Harris Page A

billions of kilometers from where it had originally created the singularity. Space travel was achieved through the constant creation and dissolving of hundreds of these tiny black holes along the line of travel.
    Of course, as with any great scientific discovery, there were guidelines to be followed to achieve maximum results.
    Gravity drives were constantly being affected by other gravity sources around them, such as stars, nebulae and even other black holes. One simply couldn’t plot a straight-line course through space. In addition, gravity drives were very temperamental with regard to the amount of matter available within a particular region of space. Too little matter and the critical mass for singularity generation could not be achieved. Too much and the amount of matter drawn toward the singularity would cause a rainstorm of deadly projectiles capable of ripping any starship to shreds. These large-mass singularities were also very unstable and hard to control.
    For true deep-well generation, just the right mix of matter and void had to be found. This requirement restricted truly swift movement throughout the galaxy to a relatively few well-established gravity lanes. Here the large interstellar spacecraft could crank up their wells and travel at speeds of several hundred light years per standard hour. Using these lanes, a journey from the planet Earth to Juir for example – a distance of approximately twenty-thousand light years – could be achieved in just over under nine standard months.
    However, for the majority of travel within the galaxy, these kinds of speeds could not be employed. Journey between relatively close star systems – as well as within the systems themselves – was reserved for shallow-well generation.
    With so many competing gravity sources and ample clusters of matter in the form of dust and debris throughout the bulk of the galaxy, shallow-well speeds were greatly reduced, often down to only a few millions of kilometers per hour. It was like comparing atmospheric ramjet speeds to those of surface wheeled transport, and with those transports having to navigate down narrow streets and between buildings. These smaller spaceships could include within their engine rooms massive gravity generators capable of much higher speeds, but why would they? It would be like carrying a ramjet engine on the back of your wheeled transport, just in case one needed to jump a twenty kilometer-wide canyon at some point. It just wasn’t practical.
    So the three worlds the Klin chose as their main sanctuaries were well-isolated from the major deep-well gravity lanes, and far enough from normal star-to-star trade that they remained hidden from most prying eyes for hundreds of years.   
     
       

    Four thousand years ago, at the time of the Reckoning , there had been approximately forty-eight thousand Klin living off-planet or on ships in space. The surviving Klin had run for their lives, moving from refuge to refuge as the Juireans expanded their empire. The Klin are very slow breeders, often not reaching physical maturity until after seventy-standard, so even in the present time, the descendants of these survivors still only numbered about two-hundred thousand adults.
    The past two hundred years had been the most stable for the Klin, as the push by the Juireans to bring new members into their Expansion had subsided. The Juireans were now content to let new worlds approach them with requests for membership, often after these worlds had been exposed to the realities of galactic society by the frontier explorers.
    It was also around this time that the Pleabaens of the Klin had first devised the current plan for revenge against the Juireans, the one that was rapidly falling apart – thanks to the Humans.
    The Juireans had never been a very forward-looking race, and the recent evolution of their society had made them even less so. In the time before becoming a galactic power, the Juireans – as did most all races –