Satrap of Saturn

[like 25% of this is now deprecated; my thoughts on Khartoum, the Confederation, and the long war have changed; but this is still the longest thing i've actually written for other people and not as a worldbuilder talking amongst themselves ;> ] A frontier star system with a nickel-iron planet suitable for domestication. The system became a destination for refugees at the end of the war between the Confederation and Meretrix-Miskatauntaun. Some ships had been in flight for just over 300 years, with children and youth of the third generation born in the evacuation. The refugee fleet selected Khartoum for their final destination because it was at that time still undeveloped, of no military interest beyond the common resources of metal, hydrogen, ice, available in systems with infrastructure. Miskatauntaun had for centuries lacked the power or will to slaughter Terhume populations out of mere inferiority and contempt, nor harvest and digest biomass without strategic need. Khartoum w

[Part of this I originally wrote as a paean to VSCA's game Diaspora and shared on G+ in its waning days; part is my own schema for a deep future galactic science fiction that I find compelling.] What is the Diaspora ? A galaxy speckled with human habitation: humanity digesting the galaxy, and the galaxy digesting human beings. Diaspora means growth, great distance, enormous time, collapse, oblivion, renewal, isolation. The Diaspora is the human cultural and physical evolution from a planetary organism to an interstellar organism. What is the Terhumene ? The galactic civilization as such occupying the Diaspora and cognizant of the patterns of interstellar history. The Terhumene is people by terhumes, the people of the Cradle world, clever vicious apes that dream of heaven, and accompanied by variously clever machines, earth animals altered to think, speak, and prosecute lawsuits, and xenobiological organisms with the same dubious human intervention. There are no living xenosophont