Thirteen years after the Meridian Ring came down, the debris belt is not only scrap. Scattered across the fields stand pieces of the Ring that landed whole and never stopped working, and the things the first salvage years built among them: gun nests, clinics, warning masts, factories still humming in the dust.
For six years, the Salvage Accord of Nadir kept them in common. A standing structure belonged to nobody: any crew on site could file a claim and use it, and the next crew could file again. Then, in May 2107, the shooting started at Impact Field 41, and the Accord died with it.
The paperwork is gone. Only the rule is left.
It belongs to whoever walks in and keeps it.
The only rule left on the frontier
A lawyer with a toolkit. Under the Orbital Property Accord of 2039 every bolt that fell is still Consortium property, and the agent files the claim and rewrites the access codes in the same minute.
Skips the filing and does the rest with a wrench.
Either way the engineer stays inside to run it. The moment the door shuts, the building changes hands.
To take one back, walk your own engineer in. Shoot it down instead, and the wreck has to be repaired before anyone can claim it again.
Pressure bulkheads from a fallen habitat ring, dug in by the militias in the lawless years before the Nadir Charter and armed with whatever they could find. Every pass in the belt has one, and most have changed hands more often than anyone can remember.
A Ring factory module that came down intact and never shut off. It still runs its last program, taking in scrap, sorting it and turning out clean stock, and it pays whoever holds the door.
Part of the old crash-warning network: masts on the high ground that tracked every falling fragment and fed the crash maps sold on every market in the belt. Whoever holds one sees what the mast sees.
An aid post from the Accord years, where relief crews patched up salvage workers from both sides. The crews left when the war began. The machines stayed, and they still treat anyone who comes through the door.
A piece of the Ring’s uplink array that still answers its old handshake. Through it, its holder can borrow a look from the sensors still circling in orbit, League or Consortium alike. Some crews swear it answers a moment before it is asked.
In orbit, these guns broke up debris before it could hit the Ring, so they were built to hit hard and far. A few came down in one piece. Their fire control still obeys the Ring’s old three-key rule: no single crew may arm a Ring weapon.
None of them are on your map at the start: they wait under the fog until your scouts pass by. Finding them is the easy part.
An engineer is the softest thing on the field, and the enemy knows where the structures are too. Getting one there alive is the hard part.
Ring hardware was built to be repaired, not replaced. Shoot a fallen structure down, and its frame still stands in the dust. A Repair Drone or a Mechanic brings it back to life. Then a Claims Agent, or a second Mechanic, has to walk in and hold it again.
The skirmish map is finished to the standard the rest will be judged by. The Game
