The Story

Life was always tried to search new places to inhabit. Mankind was a good tool in the hand of nature to support this aim. It invented the wheel to explore the continents, invented ships to explore the seas and build airplanes to reach the sky. The last step towards conquer the universe was to reach space.

The realistic proposal of space travel goes back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His most famous work, The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices, was published in 1903, but this theoretical work was not widely influential outside of Russia.
Spaceflight became an engineering possibility with the work of Robert H. Goddard's publication in 1919 of his paper 'A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes'; where his application of the de Laval nozzle to liquid fuel rockets gave sufficient power that interplanetary travel became possible. This paper was highly influential on Hermann Oberth and Wernher Von Braun, later key players in spaceflight.
The first rocket to reach space was a prototype of the German V-2 Rocket, on a test flight on October 3, 1942, although sub-orbital flight is not considered a spaceflight in Russia. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, which became the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The first human spaceflight was Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, aboard which Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made one orbit around the Earth. The lead architects behind the Soviet space program's Vostok 1 mission were the rocket scientists Sergey Korolyov and Kerim Kerimov.

Rockets remained the only currently practical means of reaching space by the end of 21th century. It was common in all space related researches that the energy consumption of the propulsion systems was enormous. The finite amount of energy that a spacecraft could carry limited the distance of space flights.
In 2020 the existence of the dark-matter was proven in the LHC. However, creating it and maintain it for longer periods which would make it possible to utilize it seemed to be impossible.

In 2082 astronauts found a special crystal in the intra-stellar system which could compress every matter around it leaving the dark-matter after itself. With the help of the crystal it seemed to be possible top solve the problem of creating dark-matter on purpose. The crystal was very unstable and was found that it required special environment to exist. In the inter-stellar system it seemed that no other planet can maintain similar crystals. Several experiments with the crystals showed that it reacts with the interference with laser and starts to grow slowly providing a renewable energy source for the holder of the crystal.

The crystal made it possible to accomplish the first worm hole jump in 2170. The new type of travelling required extremely high concentration of energy which was supplied by the dark matter and of cource by the crystal indirectly. While exploring new galaxies it was found that the crystal is not unique in our galaxy but can be found in several other galaxies.
It was found that the crystal becomes unstable when it is detached from its growing source and begins to dissolve shortly. However, the process could be slowed down enough to make it possible to make the crystal transported.
Meanwhile the first experiments utilizing the crystal for military purposes were also conducted. The crystal was built in a dark-matter bomb to compress every matter around it in a certain area. No possible way seemed to stop the destruction but an other crystal bomb. The crystal bomb effect could be neutralized with an other crystal bomb of equal size. They absorbed each others dark-matter and simply vanished.

The owner of the crystal seemed to have complete monopoly in space exploration, energy supply, political force, etc. Others could not let this happen. In 2222 a coordinated attack on the crystal mine in the inter-stellar system was conducted by allied forces of several individuals to seize some crystal and take part in conquering of the galaxy. A small part of the crystal can be obtained in a reasonable price in the black-market. You decide to get some and take part in the ruling of the universe competition. Your story just begins...