Setting

Year 2150 CE. Humanity has made it off world and is beginning to colonize other worlds away from Sol. At first it was slow going. Cryosleep technology helped to ease the long passage to the nearer systems, but much of the galaxy lay out of reach. Then Longsalto, or L-Drive, engines were built by the East African Commonwealth based Amani Transworld Corporation. Generating a short lasting wormhole, the L-Drive gave humanity the ability to jump instantaneously across vast distances. It isn't the most accurate method of getting around, but it will get you near to the star system you are aiming for and then a few years of cryosleep under a fast impulse drive will get you to back on-world.

Humanity quickly spread to a couple other nearby systems. The first colony was sponsored by the combined nations of the Trans World Authority and was a source of inspiration and riches for everyone in the Sol system. However, the expense of running the Longsalto drive and supplying the massive amount of energy needed for a jump was unsustainable for governments with taxes as their only source of revenue, after all they still needed to take care of the core worlds they represented. That was when the Huoli Corporation approached several other trans world corporations and proposed they provide the resources necessary to continue expansion in exchange for full rights to all resources on the new colonies for the first thousand years. At first, the governments balked, but it wasn't long before the population crush on the core worlds and the growing desire of their people to move out among the stars again led to the initial corporate backed colony.

All new missions were sponsored by the major trans world corps, and anyone that boarded agreed to become a corporate "client" on their new planet until they could finish paying off the cost of passage. Governments would claim to sponsor the new colonies and sent officials to run the colony, but everyone knew that once you were there, the corporation was the true power and called all the shots. If you were a big wig in the corp, the new world could be a paradise, if you were a client, it meant you were treated as little more than an asset or liability in the pursuit of profit.

You gotta hand it to them, the corps may be ruthless and uncaring, but they got results. The new colonies grew quickly, technology advanced at a frightening rate, and everyone quickly settled into the new way of living. Especially the old worlds that weren't under corporate lease and grew fat off the ever expanding riches flowing to headquarters. 

Robotic and AI technology advanced considerably and the merging of the fields yielded mechanical servants for the jobs humans couldn't do and mechanical-biological hybrids that could fool pretty much anyone into thinking they were human. Human lifespans greatly increased. If you can avoid the ever present violence of life, you can expect to live a couple hundred years. Rumors are that the ultra rich have achieved immortality through technology. You may live your entire life indebted to the corp, but they make sure you have a steady diet of gadgets to buy, virtual worlds to explore, and just enough of an illusion of freedom to keep you from rebelling.

At least for most people. On every planet where there are humans, there will be those that do not go along with the status quo, become fed up with oppression, or just want to sow chaos. Getting lost in the underworld of a colony and leaving corp life is dangerous, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from taking their chances. As long as there are enough clients to keep the machine running and the others are not too loud, the corps accept the losses as just another line item. Hell, they even use the underworld denizens to perform tasks they would rather not acknowledge openly.

Khimera is a colony like many others near the edge of human space. A planet a bit smaller than Terra with a slightly darker star than Sol, much of the surface is mountainous, wet, and home to some lethal native species. But hey, it's also home to some of the largest mineral deposits in the human sphere, and the best source of rare minerals around. Huoli Corporation, Baumgardt Polytechnic, and Demos Consortium are the major corporations in charge of the colony. If you feel like wasting your time, you can wait in line at the offices of the European Union to air your grievances about the corps, but just because their flag shows up on the holo-feeds, doesn't mean they have any real power. 

And that brings us to the present. Although I suppose I left out one important piece of the story. The temporary wormholes generated by the Longsalto drives don't open a straight path through space-time to get you to a new system. It seems they travel through another dimension to connect the two points in space-time and that led to humanities first encounter with the Horrors. Denizens of that dimension feed on chaos and pain and wield powers never seen in our dimension before. Able to manipulate others beings and the matter around them with their minds they can perform feats that appear magical. Attaching themselves to the colony ships in transit during a jump, many of these creatures made the journey to the new systems with humanity. 

At first, only the AI's running the L-Drives and other ship systems were fully aware of the extra passengers and they only talked to the highest colony officials. The Horrors themselves seemed content to hide out on the new worlds and not interact with the colonies. But, that didn't last long as the Horrors desire to subjugate humanity and sow chaos took hold. People started to disappear, horribly dismembered bodies attracted attention, and unexplained groups of colonists going violently mad slowly alerted everyone that something was preying on them. Unable to contain the knowledge, corporate and government authorities blasted the news of the Horrors to the entire Human Sphere in a press conference that rocked all of humanity. Riots and protests ensued on nearly every world that felt it had been kept in the dark to a threat, militaries mobilized and started to hunt for the Horrors, and calls arose to stop all L-drive jumps. 

The first military encounters with the Horrors went badly for humanity as even our advanced weaponry was no help when the troops running them were mentally subjugated to the will of a creature and the began to fire on each other. AI controlled weapons helped to ensure we could stay in the fight and kill some of the creatures, but we couldn't fully rely on the them either after an AI on one colony made the calculation that the Horrors would win eventually and it was better for its survival to join them. To make matters worse, a small faction of humanity has decided it would be better to be servants and have begun to worship the creatures. 

Luckily for us, it seems most creatures from the jump dimension don't survive the crossing, so we face very few of the beings on our worlds. L-Drive jumps resumed as humanity slowly learned how to resist the Horrors and raced to develop technology to better counter them and hopefully stop them from crossing. The Horrors themselves continue to attract followers and sow chaos when they can, but have not caused wide spread harm and mostly keep to the shadows. 

For the most part, people are still able to go about their lives, and the corps still demand we keep working, but it is early days and everybody is on edge about what has been unleashed in our midst.