The Fray · Gate system
Quietly proud of feeding half the sector.
An agrarian, cooperative system, governed town-by-town by elected Grange Councils rather than any single authority. Practical, rural, unpretentious, and quietly proud of feeding half the sector.
Exports grain, algae protein, and aquaculture goods across the Fray, especially to industrial Vosk and Cindergate. Imports machinery parts, medical technology, and the occasional luxury good nobody feels guilty about wanting.
Middling and comfortable. Nobody in Tanager is rich; nobody starves either.
Deep soil surveys on Amaranth occasionally turn up old agricultural equipment far more advanced than anything the original colonists arrived with — as if someone else farmed this world first, and farmed it well.
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Burn time follows the chosen g; at 1× playback the trip plays in 6.5 seconds.
Diagram is schematic — orbits are not to scale. See distance and measurement.
Places
A partially terraformed rocky world. Its capital is less a dense city than a sprawling patchwork of farming communities, famous for “Tanager Reds,” a hardy grain strain grown nowhere else as well.
A smaller moon whose settlements occupy inherited Precursor aquaculture domes of perfectly clear, glass-like material, close enough that each world is visible through the shells as a disc in the other's sky. More working-class and industrial than genteel Amaranth; the two Grange Councils bicker constantly, and good-naturedly, over trade shares.
Too little air to breathe, which is why everything here is under inherited Precursor domes whose clear, glass-like shells cannot be cut or reproduced.
A wide band of dirty ice, and the reason Tanager can water its farms without buying from anyone. Coldwater is a cluster of mining rigs and a bunkhouse, crewed six months on and six off; nobody has ever been born there and the Granges intend to keep it that way.