The Fray · Fringe system
The frontier past the frontier.
The frontier past the frontier. If Halcyon is rough, Widow's Reach is barely a place at all. Named by a Sojourner crew that arrived at full strength and came back short several people, for reasons they never fully explained.
Essentially none beyond bare survival. The rare Sojourner who makes this trip does it for the mystery, not the profit.
Essentially none beyond bare survival.
This is the alien-rumor system. The Reach Colony's people speak carefully, if at all, about “the neighbors” — something out there they've learned not to provoke. Whether “the neighbors” are surviving Precursors, a genuinely independent alien species, or a story the Colony invented to keep outsiders away is completely unresolved. That's the point.
System chart
Diagram is schematic — orbits are not to scale. See distance and measurement.
Places
A heavy world of disputed classification, since no survey team has stayed long enough to be thorough — at nearly twice a standard gee, a season here is a medical event. The Reach Colony holds perhaps two hundred people, descended from a couple of stranded or deliberately-settling crews; insular, wary of outsiders, barely self-sufficient.