The Ledger Wars

• createdMade peopleThe Drift's broad class of self-aware beings built on purpose: clones, constructs, symbiont hosts, tank-raised listeners, and other living weapons left behind by the war.
• empoweredMeridian CombineA private defense cartel responsible for Project OUROBORAN, the Umbra Reef extraction colony, and its sterilization atrocity.
• erasedNull CellA deniable mercenary unit removed from the record instead of paid. Jinx and Nightshade are its last two known survivors.
• left scars acrossThe DriftA belt of worn settled systems: orbital stations, half-terraformed colonies, and sprawl-yards linked by slow travel, local law, repair culture, and work for hire.
• links hereCinderThe forge world whose foundries cast the war's exo-frames and never fully shut down: the orders were never cancelled because the cartels that could cancel them no longer exist, so the…
• links hereKarst OrderSable's martial order (not for hire), which moves against the cartels and corruption that made the Drift a ledger, on his judgment alone.
• links hereMireThe bayou that swallowed a war: a Ledger Wars jungle front left behind when the money moved on, sunk under black swamp water among huge moss-hung trees, lily pads, mist and fireflies.
• links hereMire front abandonedWhen the Ledger Wars money moved on, Mire's jungle front was simply left: transports stopped coming, the frames were never recovered, and over the years the swamp rose over the trenches…
• links hereRoost CovenantBaron Corbeau's private, self-created discipline: ravens audit the dead, must be fed first, and every life taken must be recorded honestly.
• links hereThe PicketsThe Mire front's unmanned sentry drones, still flying their patrol circuits over the channels decades after the war left: lean armoured wings in scorched olive paint, one amber optic…
• links hereThe Sunder fallWhen the cartels went bankrupt, nobody paid for station-keeping, and the dreadnoughts parked in Sunder's orbit came down one by one over years as each orbit ran out.
• links hereThe Switch-OffThe years after the Ledger Wars' bankruptcy when receivers auctioned the cartels' communications relays line item by line item.
• links hereThe mark (coin)Post-Ledger scrip kept alive by common consent. People almost always call it coin rather than marks.

1. 1. Ledger Wars

      Successor powers wage decades of proxy war and manufacture made people as military assets.

   2. War's end

      The Ledger Wars end through institutional bankruptcy; units such as Null Cell are erased and unpaid weapons scatter into the Drift.

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