Life in the rock
The largest cities hold a few hundred thousand people. Most Hollowers live in towns of a few hundred to a few thousand, dug into bodies a few kilometres across.
Messages cross the Solar Web in minutes, but ships between rocks take months. No power can rule closely far from home, so the belt is a world of city-states, closer to the Bronze Age Mediterranean or classical Greece than to a modern nation.
- Population
- About 5 million
- Largest city
- Occator Deep, 350,000
- Survivors in 20 AC
- About 100,000
- The year
- 2251, or 150 AC
The old belt and the frontier
The old belt is the inner and middle belt, settled during the Exodus on native rock. It is crowded, claimed and mostly free of the Interloper's material. It is also short of water.
The frontier is the outer belt and the high-inclination orbits where the Interloper's shattered moons ended up. It is rich in ice and volatiles, almost unclaimed, and hard to reach. Since the Hygiea Settlement of 140 AC, charters to claim it have been granted for the first time.
The debris field
The remains of Earth and Mars lie in a broad, still-settling ring between about 1 and 1.6 AU from the Sun. It is dangerous, but full of salvage: homeworld fragments carrying soil, ruins, buried archives and seeds.
Fragment salvage is valuable and culturally charged. The Gravers who work it grow rich, and some call what they do grave-robbing.
Technology
Near-future engineering, refined by a century of hard survival.
- Power: fission reactors and solar. Fusion exists only as a handful of unreliable prototypes.
- Ships: nuclear-thermal and electric drives, mass drivers, and flight computers that fly the ship while crews give the orders. There is no faster-than-light travel, and no artificial gravity beyond spin.
- Chips: fabrication went backwards in one key area. Advanced chips were made in fabs in low Earth orbit that died in the Passage, so pre-Conjunction electronics are precious, and old-world chips are traded like heirlooms.
The Solar Web
The network of relays that ties the belt together, rebuilt by the Shackleton League during the Holding. It carries messages, news and the job market, and it runs the ledger behind the belt's money: credits are entries in the Web's ledger.
Whoever maintains the relays has quiet power. Relay hacking is how corporate espionage is done.
Water is power
Ice is drinking water, air, radiation shielding and reaction mass all at once. Every tonne burned to move a ship is a tonne nobody can drink or breathe, and that trade-off runs through every decision a colony makes.
The old belt is short of water, and Ceres holds most of what there is. That is why the frontier, rich in the Interloper's ice, matters so much.
Culture and memory
Earth is six generations gone, as distant as the 1870s are for us: known from records and family stories, and already turning into founding myth.
- Conjunction Day
- Observed every year. Lights are dimmed for an hour, and the names of home towns are read out. The Ceres Assembly flies the old flags; the Seedkeepers hold the Reading of Species, naming Earth's lost animals one by one.
- Berth lines
- Berth lines have hardened into ancestry. Families still call themselves skill-born, lottery-born or Charter-born, and the old resentments come with the labels.
- Reaction mass
- Slang for people who get spent so that others can move: the Shackleton crews, the Left Behind, lottery losers, debt-bonded haulers. "We're just mass to them."
- The Left Behind
- Central to the culture's guilt. Earth relics are treated with something close to reverence, and "you'd have left them behind" is a deadly insult.
- The Ember
- The Interloper hangs in the sky as a reminder, a dull red point. Children are taught it will come back.
- Keeping time
- Hollowers count years After the Conjunction. Ceres still keeps the Earth calendar; the Red Clans keep Mars time, counting their days in sols.