The Fray · Gate system
Hard-edged, dug in, and honest about its own class tension.
A hard-edged mining and industrial system, run by an uneasy coalition of labor guilds and mining concerns known as the Vosk Compact. Tough, no-nonsense, and honest about its own class tension between the people who own the mines and the people who work them.
Exports refined ore, heavy manufactured goods, and ship components sector-wide. Imports food (largely from Tanager) and the medical and luxury goods its own wealth doesn't quite stretch to.
Mixed. Guild leadership and mine owners live well. Line workers often don't. The system as a whole reads as middling, but that number hides a real gap.
Vosk's Hollow's deepest tunnels have twice broken into pre-existing passages that nobody dug — older than the colony, possibly Precursor, possibly something else entirely. Miners call them “the Old Bores” and mostly agree not to talk about them on shift.
System chart
Diagram is schematic — orbits are not to scale. See distance and measurement.
Places
A large moon, heavily domed and dug in underground. Deepmarket, the system's largest settlement, is built mostly below the surface. Deep mining here extracts rare heavy metals and the occasional vein of pre-Diaspora ore — and, twice now, the Old Bores.
A loose cluster of independent mining rigs in the asteroid belt. Rougher, more dangerous, and less regulated than Deepmarket, and everyone there prefers it that way.
Figures describe the working rock; the rigs themselves are pressurised and spun.
A frozen world the Compact opened for deep ore after the Hollow's better seams thinned. Sable Deep is a shaft head, a reactor and eighty people on rotation, and the hazard pay is the only thing anyone likes about it.