Humanity struggled out of its birth cradle, painfully growing away from Earth, before finally establishing colonies elsewhere in its solar system. Some ultimately doomed attempts at limited long-range exploration via generation ships occurred, but contact was lost long-ago with these ships and no sign of their continued existence has ever been discovered, even from the most powerful telescopes. The stars seemed to be denied to mankind.

But then the first transitory "wormsigns" were discovered. These quantum fluctuations seemed to always precede a momentary flaw or hole in the regular material of space-time. These intermittent fluctuations turned out to be fairly common (as space phenomena go) but existed only a few milliseconds before collapsing again of their own accord, as if the universe was quick to erase them as soon as they popped up.

Eventually, enterprising scientists (under the constant scrutiny of Republican Guardians) unlocked the secret of predicting when wormsigns would occur. They set about trying to stabilize one of the "holes" and discovered the means of pouring huge amounts of energy into the rift to stabilize the hole and see what was beyond. What they found was that the "holes" were actually the long-theorized wormholes and that an object inserted into the rift would emerge safely on the other side, as if stepping through a door. It was only a matter of time thereafter before wormhole travel was possible.

The Aukland Fluxfields were developed to stabilize the tunnel and keep it from scrambling the minds of those that passed through. Humanity could finally reach to the stars!

However, the situation wasn't ideal. Wormholes can't be created...only found. So countless wormholes are stabilized for every one that leads to somewhere interesting or useful. Still...it was infinitely better than the failed generation ships, and there were no other choices, so the wormhole network was created, one stabilized rift at a time.

The Republic dreaded unregulated expansion. A rush to the siren call of Frontier would destabilize the millennium-long reign of the Republic, and worse, give rise to the birth of governments that might one day struggle against the Republic.

So, they trickled colonies out and established them slowly, one per decade or so, working to achieve a "perfect" expansion plan that resulted in little or no potential for unrest.

Over time, the colonies grew and so did the Republic. Until the fateful day they opened the wormhole to Auraxis.