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// Colonial Survey: Record Current as of Y99 IE
Y99 IE · VARIABLE-DENSITY

Holdfast Station

Orbital Platform The Aldric Family Independent
// Survey Assessment
Population
12
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50

Approx. 180 permanent. Transit population 600–800 against a design spec of 400. Spec has never been enforced.

Traffic
24
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50

Significant node in off-the-books cargo movement. Four docking bays, eight-position external clamp array.

Governance
16
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50

Single-family operational authority. Enforcement by leverage over docking, fuel, and medical access. No civil structure.

Integration Density
9
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50

Variable and unreliable. Signal 12 functions as 7–9 on a moderate day, 4–5 during active Flux conditions.

Hazard
31
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50

6–8 significant Flux Storm events per year, Category 2 or above. Exposure rated Cat. 3–4.

Isolation
42
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50

Last formally recognized installation in sector before coverage becomes insufficient for standard operations. Specialist transit: three weeks.

// Notable Locations
The Hub Docks Docking
Description

Four bays: two rated for mid-tonnage freighters, two for light cargo or personal ships.

Reached by climbing a spoke against falling gravity.

Dock Six Berth
Description

Berth of the Null Margin.

Dock Eight Berth
Description

One berth over. Bio-hazard crates staged outside.

The External Clamp Array Docking
Description

Eight positions. Where gap-traders tie up.

They do not enter the station's core sections without negotiation.

Spoke Three Structure
Description

Elevators, manual access, a maintenance hatch.

The bar sits near its base, at ring level and full gravity.

Spoke Two Structure
Description

Elevators and manual access.

The Catcher Arms Structure
Description

Approximately three-quarters up a spoke toward the hub. Near-zero-g.

Mama Ying's Commerce
Description

Market corridor running between the bar and the Spoke Three elevators.

The Medical Bay Facility
Description

Includes a Flux-shielded treatment room.

One of the three levers Station Operations holds.

// Resident Interests
The Aldric Family Station Operations
Description

Operators for approximately 45 years.

Maret Aldric bought the debt and the station simultaneously. Authority rests on control of docking access, fuel, and the medical bay.

The Regulars Fringe Captains
Description

A dozen or so Fringe cargo captains. Multi-generational familiarity with station leadership.

The Information Dealers Brokers
Description

Three or four individuals.

Corp Logistics Presence Corporate
Description

Invisible but real.

The Gap-Dwellers Border Community
Description

Forty to sixty individuals of the border community.

Operate from the outer clamp array.

// Notes
  • › Built approximately 40 years before the Integration as a conventional transit and fuel depot — part of the third wave of colonial expansion.
  • › The name was the construction crew's. Holdfast was what they called the job.
  • › Not a destination. A pause between things.
  • › Generates gravity by rotation: a habitat ring connected by spokes to a central hub. Down is outward toward the ring; up is inward toward the hub. Full gravity at the ring, effectively zero-g at the hub.
  • › Anchored above a gas giant whose mass casts a modest natural Flux shadow. Docking structures face planetward. Known intellectually, felt by no one.
  • › "Spinward" is the in-world directional term.
  • › Commerce runs on three tracks: legitimate cargo transit, off-the-books commerce, and gap-trade. Manifests change between stops.
  • › External arrays retract automatically at Category 2. Docking clamps are rated to Category 4.
  • › The first warning of a Flux Storm is the distortion starting, not an overlay notification.
  • › Between Y14 and Y99 the population more than doubled and the commerce layered. Infrastructure did not. Specialists are still three weeks out and still uninterested.
  • › Two ships banned in forty-five years. Both for the same offense — violence in the docking ring.
First Appearance: Dead Reckoning integrationera.com
Classification: PUBLIC by Charlie Forêt Places Updated [2026.08.16]
// Background

Background

Holdfast was never meant to be anywhere. It was built four decades before the Integration as a fuel stop on a route that mattered to somebody, by a crew who named it after the job rather than the place, and it has spent every year since being added to by people who never intended to stay and did not leave. The architecture records this. Nothing about the station was planned; everything about it was appended.

It sits at the outer edge of the Fringe, the last installation in the sector that anyone officially recognizes before Integration coverage degrades past the point where standard operations can be sustained. That degradation is not a rumor or a rating on a chart — it is a daily condition. An operator arrives with a Signal score and discovers that the number is aspirational. Overlay warnings arrive late or not at all. On Holdfast, the first sign of a Flux Storm is the air going strange, and the people who have been there longest are the ones who stopped waiting for the notification.

Authority on the station is a family and three levers: docking access, fuel, and the medical bay. Maret Aldric has held all three for most of forty-five years and has used them to enforce exactly one rule, which is that violence does not happen in the docking ring. Everything else — the manifests that change between stops, the gap-traders on the outer clamps, the information dealers working the market corridor — is treated as commerce, because half the economy would leave if it were treated as anything else.

In the eighty-five years between its first appearance in the record and its current survey, Holdfast doubled its population, layered its factions, and became a significant node in cargo that does not appear on any registry. The infrastructure did not improve. The storms did not lessen. The border moved closer. And the underlying fact of the place did not change at all: it is still somewhere you end up, not somewhere you go.

// End of data file