Fast and reliable communication is critical to the maintenance of empires, the growth of free thought, the needs of a modern economy, and the deployment of military assets. As humanity has grown, the family of humans and aliens is increasingly reliant on communications technology to stay in touch.

On a planetary scale, communication has been cheap and instantaneous for almost five centuries. An armada of satellites orbits all developed worlds, dedicated to providing connectivity to the citizens below. The average citizen carries comm gear in the form of a data slate, headset, or computer gauntlet. The same network of satellites provides audio, video, and holo mediums, serving as the backbone for the Grid.

For communicating within an individual star system, the limits that light speed imposes make the use of radio and laser mediums cumbersome. Within the familiar Sol system, for example, a message from Earth takes more than four hours to reach Neptune; any reply takes just as long. Since radio waves are inexpensive and easy to generate, many star systems continue to rely on this method. But for a culture that has grown beyond a single planet of a star system -or for one with the ambition to do so- radio and laser mediums simply don't produce the desired result.

The mass transceiver- invented by the VoidCorp division Insight in 2330- revolutionized in-system communication. While a thousand times more costly than radio, the mass transceiver accelerates compressed and massless graviton packets. Instead of propagating normally-that is, at the speed of light -these particles move at several times their normal speed, making communication near a star effectively instantaneous. The new technology changed the nature of the average star system; an entire system could suddenly be administered from one point. Today, most planets and ships rely on the mass transceiver.

The mass transceiver suffers under a single limitation that has prevented it from becoming the instrument used for communications everywhere. Since the transceiver depends on the star's gravity as a carrier frequency, its range is limited by the star's own mass and gravitational well. Communication beyond a star's cometary belt is impossible. For the typical G-class star similar to Sol or Aegis, that places the maximum range of the mass transceiver at about 100 AU. For larger stars, that range can extend up to 10 times that distance; for the smallest red dwarfs, the range of a mass transceiver may be only 10 AU.

Drivespace communication relays predate the existence of the mass transceiver by a century. Nevertheless, the mass transceiver's limitation to a single system makes drivespace communication the standard for transmitting messages between star systems. Drivespace communication utilizes the same principles as the stardrive itself to send a relay momentarily into drivespace. Since the drive relay isn't actually traveling anywhere, its trip to and return from drivespace are nearly simultaneous. During the few seconds that a drivesat sits in drivespace, it launches an energy carrier wave to other drivesats within 50 light-years. These transmissions take 11 hours to reach their destination, and thus contact between star systems always operates on a delay. Messages traveling from the heart of Old Space to the edge of the frontier -some 1,000 light-years away- take about nine days to reach their destination, carried over a network of relays. A reply takes the same time.

The political, military, and economic impacts of drivespace communication are endless. Drivespace communication makes the existence of interstellar nations and empires possible, but its limitations place some heavy burdens on these institutions. Because communications are slow between systems, economic forecasters must accurately predict the need for resources; ships that respond to changing market needs are even slower. Military forces suffer the same problems; during the Second Galactic War, drivesats were primary targets. Finally, delayed contact diminishes the ability of central governments to control individual systems. Hence regional authorities possess considerable power, even within huge stellar nations.

For the stellar nations, nowhere are the lines of support and communications longer than those to the Verge. Only three Verge systems can boast drivespace relays. Tendril, Aegis, and Hammer's Star have been home to relays since before the Second Galactic War, and the Concord Communications Commission has recently completed overhauls of all three. The high cost of drivespace relays hasn't encouraged their proliferation on the frontier, but several stellar nations have begun to consider such constructions. To stay in touch with the rest of human space, all Verge drivesats depend on the crucial link at Kendai, one of the few inhabited systems in the barren stretch between the tamed regions of space and the Verge. Since the Kendai relay was restored in 2496, it has become one of the most active drive-comm relays outside the heart of Old Space.

Frontier systems without a drivespace relay must depend on merchants who carry messages much like any form of cargo. For a fee, these data merchants deliver messages between colonies and the nearest drivespace relay. To prevent tampering, sophisticated cryptography protects the privacy of transmissions. The profit margins in message traffic generally aren't exceptional, so most merchants use it only to supplement their normal trading. In addition, today all data merchants must be licensed by the Concord Communications Commission-and the CCC has high standards. The CCC's lengthy background checks ensure that message carriers of the 26th century can be trusted.

Infotrading's weakness, especially in the Verge, is its vulnerability to outside interference. While drivespace communication is almost invulnerable to malfeasance, the same cannot be said of the many independent traders and small corporations that deal in messages. Despite the best efforts of the CCC, more carriers are still lost to accidents and attack by undisciplined rogues and desperate pirates. Star Force, the Galactic Concord's spaceborne military, suffers public condemnation for its inability to end piracy, but the brutal fact is that Concord resources are just too thin in the underpopulated systems and less-traveled star lanes to stop piracy entirely.

Music gauntlets produce symphonies unimagined by the previous generation. Hypochondriacs wear the same medical gauntlets paramedics use. The paranoid carry weapon detectors to reveal the armed and dangerous. Psi-detectors reveal whether neighbors probe each other's minds. And sensor gauntlets enable scientific exploration -or simply permit bored citizens to watch over neighbors and gossip.