John Drake's Stories

The Dark Star Universe

Birth of the Galactic Federation

Book 1 of the Dark Star Trilogy
Point of No Return

A human colony ship en route to a new planet is a prestigious, but nonthreatening, assignment. All of that goes horribly wrong when the Midgar-6 makes first contact with a hostile alien race. Now, Captain Amara Black and her crew have one chance to save a million colonists in suspended animation… but they might have even bigger problems…

With Europe1 and Darinost

Chapter 1 – The Midgar-6
Chapter 2 – The Ship Graveyard
Chapter 3 – The Rape of a Heroine
Chapter 4 – The Eternal Torment
Chapter 5 – The Confrontation
Chapter 6 – The Mistrunner
Chapter 7 – The Demons
Chapter 8 – The Dark Star
Chapter 9 – The Inferno
Chapter 10 – The Nightmare
Chapter 11 – The Reckoning
Chapter 12 – The Failure
Epilogue – The Sacrifice

Noctis Sector Chronicles –
Be As Gods

By John Drake
Before she was a living legend, before she was the greatest scientist humanity had ever produced, Dr. Maria Keye was less than a nobody…

Noctis Sector Chronicles – The Last Hunt

by PrinceCai
On the surface of a primitive world, a race of predatory, dominant women have what will be their last hunt…

Noctis Sector Chronicles – Do Not Go Gentle

By InBrightestDay
Selara remembered the feeling that had gripped them all in those early days. Watching the alien ships in the broadcast footage had provoked a small amount of apprehension, but primarily awe. Then the invasion began…

Book 2 of the Dark Star Trilogy
Event Horizon

The Kthid prepare for the invasion of the Human Federation… but the HEF is not caught unprepared. In both empires, and in the vastness of space, the gears of war begin to grind, and if care is not taken it might grind our heroes to paste between them.

What are the Noctis Sector Chronicles?

The Noctis Sector is the area of space about 140 light years from Earth in the Eridani direction, spiralward. The sector itself refers to an unusually dense star cluster, an area of several hundred stars all within about 20 light-years of each other. This phenomenon is caused by the Dark Star, a black hole that has gathered the cluster together over hundreds of millions of years. This is the location journeyed to by Captain Talia Icarus of the Mistrunner, and it is where that ship’s doomed voyage ended.

By far its most notable feature, however, is that it appears to be where life originated. Scientists have long believed that due to the similar cellular makeup of life on other worlds humanity has discovered, that the origin of life was celestial, drifting on asteroids between words and deposited across the galaxy. With the Noctis Sector, so named for the Dark Star at its center, humanity has finally found the source of that life.

There are a high number of sentient life forms within the Noctis Sector… although at present it is unknown as to why, besides the general density of life. The Kthid originated from within this sector, as have most other races we encounter in the Dark Star Universe.

These are the stories of those races.

Some of these stories will be by me. Others will be by fans, written with my blessing and presented as such.

Technical Journals

These are details on the races, technology, and history of the Dark Star Universe. They are intended to be optional reading – the stories should all work without any of this additional context.

Technical Entries
Magnetic Shields
Lilis Wormhole
Midgar-class colony ships
Cryo-stasis and Life Extension
Uniforms of the HEF
Weapons of the HEF (Personal)
The Big Crunch
3D Printing Technology
Exalted Android Bodies
Artificial Machine Intelligence
Healing Gel
Panspermia
Void Ecology
The Fermi Paradox
Names of Stars
Singularity Drive
Lilis Warp Drive

History Entries
The Terran Federation and the Human Expansionary Fleet
The Theseus Ship Problem – AI, Consciousness, and Identity
Exploration of the Eridani Sector
Creation of the Templar

Galactic Encyclopedia of Lifeforms
The Alicians
The Arane
The Exalted
The Faliran
The Kthid
The Sethis
The Nys
The Void Tracers