All Updates
Every story, chapter, dispatch, and dossier — in order of release.
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven Nev and I finally got a hot meal, and we ate it across from each other without speaking. Mom saw the tension, tried to defuse it. My summons to the major kept me from giving in to her attempts at conversation. I stood at attention, alone with Major Ferran. She sat …
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Ten
The panels dropped and so did our sense of isolation. Work lights flooded the cavern with an actinic glare. A red beacon by the lift shaft began to strobe. "Kes?" It was Harko. "Where the hell have you three been?" At least we didn't just stand still on their monitors this time. …
Where the Integration Reaches
Overview and historical notes regarding humankind's territory within the Integration.
Calloway Tower
Background — An office tower where decisions about distant moons are made by people who will never stand on one. Floor 22 is where the deciding happens.
Veldrath Residence Spire
Background — A residence that is also an administrative capital, which is the ordinary condition of 'Garch architecture and the thing outsiders most often fail to account for.
Sagittarius Arm Settlements
Background — Vethari space as human records describe it, which is to say from the outside, at distance, and with the traffic patterns better documented than anything else.
Vethari Home System
Background — Two Architect sites in one system, held by a civilization that had them for centuries before humans had any. Human assessment of the system is secondhand and this record does not pretend otherwise.
Interarm Gap
Background — The reason the map has edges. Whatever exists on the far side of the gap is not reachable by anything human space currently operates.
Kaspar Corridor
Background — A transit route with one event attached to its name. Everyone who uses it knows what happened, and the corridor is still the way through.
Deep Fringe
Background — Far enough out that both the Integration and the institutions built on it become theoretical. People who want that condition go looking for it.
The Fringe
Background — Not the edge of the Integration but the part of it that does not work properly. An operator's stat line becomes an estimate here, and the estimate gets worse when the weather does.
Hyades Cluster
Background — Fourteen systems that answer to a family. Close enough together to be governed, far enough from anywhere else to make that governance uncontested.
Kappa 6
Background — Where fourteen systems are governed from. The distance between Kappa 6 and the systems it rules is the household's central administrative problem and its central advantage.
Vassal-7
Background — The one world in the record where anyone has written down what lives there. That the list is short says more about survey priorities than about the ecology.
Point Elroy
Point Elroy / Island Hotel-Echo-Zero-Three Background — A drilling site on a contested moon, named twice — once by the survey and once by whoever had to call it something on the radio.
Varex
Background — A tidally locked moon with three claimants and no court. Mineral rights here are settled by whoever can keep the drills turning, which is a design decision as much as a legal one.
Holliworld
Background — Deep enough into the fringe that a mercenary company can maintain a home base without anyone asking what it does between contracts.
Orith Vale
Background — A habitable world under a household in managed decline. The gravity is slightly heavy and so is everything else about doing business here.