Status: Living document. Expand as stories are written. Locations are listed by zone: Inner Worlds, Mid-System, Outer Ring, Deep Space / Unregistered.
Inner Worlds¶
Caelindra Prime¶
Zone: Inner worlds — first orbital band Faction: Synapse-Guild administrative seat Population: Approximately 4 million registered; unregistered population unknown and officially unacknowledged Atmosphere: Breathable, climate-managed. Inner-world standard. Gravity: Standard.
The political and cultural capital of the Synapse-Guild. Caelindra Prime is not a beautiful planet — it is a correct one. Every public space is proportioned, lit, and maintained to Guild aesthetic standards, which have been refined for three centuries and currently favour clean sightlines, subdued luminescence from high-grade implant stacks in crowds, and the specific silence of a city where noise carries social cost.
The upper districts — the Tessera — are where the Pure tier lives, governs, and is never seen by anyone not also in the Tessera. The mid-districts serve the Refined and Cultured tiers. The lower districts — officially the Integration Zone, informally the Underlay — house everyone else, including the unmodified service population the Guild requires but does not formally acknowledge employing.
The Tessera: A district of low structures and wide plazas at Caelindra's administrative centre. No vehicles. No noise above conversational level. The Pure tier moves through it in small groups, unhurried, their implant stacks producing a faint subdermal luminescence visible in the city's permanent low-light ambience. Outsiders are not admitted.
The Underlay: Not officially on Guild maps. It functions on informal economy, barter, and the social infrastructure that develops when a large population is excluded from the formal one. The Fabric has significant presence here. It is the one place in Caelindra where an unmodified face does not attract attention.
The Guild Agri-Platforms — Helios Shelf¶
Zone: Inner worlds — orbital agricultural platforms Faction: Synapse-Guild Classification: Restricted access, food production category
The Guild's food production infrastructure operates on a chain of orbital platforms in the first and second bands: vast, climate-sealed growing facilities maintained by a workforce that does not have neural implants and does not appear in the employment registry. The platforms are the Guild's primary leverage instrument over every other party in the system — not defended with weapons but with redundancy. Every platform can sustain operations independently for fourteen months without resupply.
Vanguard has never been contracted to defend the platforms. The Guild has never needed to ask. This is changing.
Mid-System¶
Veridion Station — Meridian Hub¶
Zone: Mid-system — the system's central transit interchange Faction: No sovereign claim. Administered by an inter-party compact not formally reviewed in sixty years. Population: Rotating — between 80,000 and 200,000 at any given time Gravity: Rotational — 0.9 standard at outer ring, 0.4 at hub
The Meridian Hub is the system's commercial and transit centre — the point through which most legal trade, passenger transit, and inter-faction diplomacy passes. Every party maintains a presence here and observes an informal convention of not conducting operations against each other on-station. The convention holds because losing access to the Hub's transit infrastructure is something no party can afford.
The Compact Floor: The Hub's central administrative level. Offices for all three factions, all three megacorporations, and several interests that do not officially exist. Whisper's dead-drop network is densest here.
The Transit Warrens: Below the Compact Floor, layered residential and commercial decks expanding through informal construction for forty years. The Rust Alliance has a social club on Deck 11 that is technically a transit workers' union hall and practically everything else.
The Debris Field — The Scatter¶
Zone: Mid-system periphery Faction: Fracture Synths (de facto; no formal claim) Navigation: Hazardous. No official charts. Allianz salvage maps are the most accurate, not shared, and updated continuously.
A band of high-density debris occupying a chaotic orbital path between the inner and outer system. Navigation requires either Allianz-grade local knowledge or reckless speed and luck. The Guild does not send ships here. Vanguard has lost two patrol assets to debris impact and stopped sending them.
The Fracture Synths have lived here since before the current political structure of the system. It is their territory in the only sense that matters: they know it and everyone else is afraid of it.
Gelon's Range: The section of the Scatter where Gelon has operated for the better part of a century. He knows the debris density, the collision corridors, the two safe anchorage points, and every Synth habitation cluster in his half of the field.
The Quiet Spot: The larger of the two stable anchorages within the Scatter. Hosts a rotating community of salvagers, Synths in and out of the Devotion, and occasionally people who need to be somewhere no one official will look. Medical services, informal. Trade, informal. Everything informal.
Outer Ring¶
The Inner-World Fringe Megacity¶
Zone: Inner-world fringe — the city where the outer ring begins Faction: Guild administration (inner tiers); Rust Alliance presence (outer ring) Population: Several million registered; the outer ring population is largely uncounted
From the docking approach, the city is the kind of enormous that has stopped trying to look finished. The inner tiers are Gilde architecture — vertical, integrated, everything connected and logged. The outer ring is what happens when that infrastructure runs out of maintenance budget and the city keeps growing anyway: warehouse districts that became residential, transit hubs that became markets, the perpetual sprawl of people who arrived with Apex contracts and never left.
The air comes through filters that are adequate rather than good. The signage is multilingual and partially broken. The people move with the practised efficiency of populations that have learned not to make eye contact with strangers who are standing still.
This is where Ana Hamato arrived on 2847.214. Where Janus follows her trail. Where Seren Vael first crosses paths with Gelon and Yamar.
Ana's Short-Stay Block¶
Zone: Third residential sector, outer ring of the megacity Type: Short-stay accommodation block
An older building — Apex-format access panel, standard short-stay turnover. Ana used a secondary name for the registration. She stayed seventeen days. She left non-standard screws on the ventilation cover and a dead-drop note on thermal paper behind it. The room was re-let. The note held for three months.
See also: Story — Anchor
Korrath IV¶
Zone: Outer Ring — third habitable body Faction: Rust Alliance (population); Apex Industrial (infrastructure contract) Population: Approximately 900,000 Atmosphere: Marginal breathable. Cold. Dust. Gravity: 0.8 standard
The largest settled body in the Outer Ring and the effective capital of Rust Alliance territory. Korrath IV exists to extract heavy isotopes from its crust and ship them to the inner system. The surface is largely open pit and processing infrastructure. The population lives underground in a network of excavated residential levels that are warm, loud, and lit with the orange of recycled heating elements.
Deeptown: The primary inhabited level — dense, continuous habitation following the original excavation grid. Noise is constant. The social infrastructure is extensive: canteens, social halls, a medical network, schools. The Guild does not fund any of it. The Alliance built it themselves over three generations.
The Open Cuts: Vast open-pit excavations. The exposure rate from heavy isotope processing is not publicly disclosed by Apex Industrial. The workers have their own estimates.
Vantage Station — Outer Ring Command¶
Zone: Outer Ring — Vanguard Orbital installation Faction: Vanguard Orbital Classification: Military installation, restricted Population: 12,000 permanent; variable rotating deployment
Vanguard's primary outer-ring asset. As Vanguard transforms from contractor to sovereign power, Vantage Station's role is shifting — from enforcement hub to military headquarters. The retrofitting is ongoing. Vanguard has not issued a public statement about what it is retrofitting for.
The Outer Ring Desert — The Fireside¶
Zone: Outer ring desert scrubland — approximately 80km east of the inner-world fringe megacity Type: Temporary camp — dry wash, concealed in erosion ridges
Where Gelon and Yamar waited out an Apex security sweep on 2847.211 — the same evening Hephaistos-9 went dark. A low fire burning on dry saltbrush. Red hardpan rock walls. The distant smear of the megacity's light on the western horizon. Stars very clear above.
See also: The Fire and the Old Stories
The Drift Corridors¶
Zone: Outer Ring — deep transit lanes Faction: None. Transit space. Navigation: Legally registered but minimally patrolled.
The long-haul transit corridors between the outer ring bodies and the mid-system Hub. This is where piracy happens. Where Yamar's family ship was boarded. Where the ejection capsule from Hephaistos-9 drifted ballistic for long enough that Janus nearly ran out of oxygen. The Rust Alliance's salvage network operates most freely here — picking up what falls out of the formal transit system through channels that don't require paperwork.
Deep Space / Unregistered¶
The Dead Ice Planet — No Registered Name¶
Zone: Outer system periphery, gravitational shadow edge Faction: None. Unregistered. See: Setting
No atmosphere. No rotation. No heat. The Flicker's signal originates here, or passes through here.
No one goes to the surface by choice. The probe telemetry at Hephaistos-9 gathered data from orbit. What is on the surface — if anything — has never been documented in any accessible record.
The surface of the dead ice planet is a deliberate gap in canon. It is the one place in the Veridion system that no character has visited and no story has described. When it is described, it will be the most significant location reveal in the series.
The Azimuth Coordinate¶
Zone: Veridion system gravitational centre Faction: None. Formally: empty space with a survey beacon. Status (story start): A point source of structured EM output, growing. Visually observable at close range as a faint bluish luminescence.
See: The Azimuth Event
The Black Ship's Origin — Unknown¶
The black ship that boarded Hephaistos-9 has no transponder, no registration, and no identified port of origin. Its operational profile is consistent with a Vanguard Orbital deniable asset, but the specific vessel does not appear in any Vanguard registry that has been accessed.
Where it came from, where it goes when not on operation, and who its principals are — beyond Whisper or whoever Whisper serves — is not stated in current canon.
See also: Setting | Factions | Megacorporations | Characters | The Azimuth Event