After the Fracture

A few years after the Fracture, families are making homes inside the asteroids of the Kuiper belt. Escape ships are being cut apart for walls, airlocks and plumbing. Colony equipment keeps the new rooms warm and pressurized. The people living there still remember the world they fled.

The arks launched and left most people behind. Those left behind were furious with the people aboard. Retaliation and collapse followed. Families who could find ships made desperate escapes into the belt, taking as many people and as much equipment as they could carry.

The survivors brought sophisticated technology with them. AI runs ships, allocates supplies and handles much of the daily work; holographic controls shine over patched bulkheads. Machinery and raw materials are harder to come by. Fission reactors provide power. Ships melt asteroid ice and expel the water under pressure for thrust. Every settlement depends on keeping old equipment working long enough to build its replacement.

Longhaulers and households

All ordinary ice-propellant traffic stays within the Kuiper belt. Only the purpose-built expedition force, using bimodal fission propulsion, can leave for the inner system. Ordinary hulls cannot gain that capability through a refit. Longhaulers connect its scattered habitats; some are independent family ships, while others carry freight under a house charter. Crews live aboard with their families, carrying repair debts and obligations from one port to the next. Before unloading, they exchange news, say where they last docked and agree on who will keep watch.

The houses grew out of the escape: relatives, adopted kin and people who swore to stay together. Their histories follow the work that got them out and kept them alive: medicine, salvage, reactor maintenance, shipbreaking. A family name can carry an old promise or an old grievance into a new settlement.

Shared institutions help people deal with one another across those loyalties. The Long Count Table keeps freight ledgers, including disputed claims. The Open Hospice arranges sanctuary and medical care. The Open Roll records membership in a household through birth, adoption or a sworn commitment. Participation is voluntary, and a household may take part in all three.

Objects and accounts

Much of the belt's history survives in practical things: a ship's registration, a repair ledger, the equipment salvaged from an escape hull. Alongside those records are the stories families tell about themselves. They do not always agree.

The house archives collect those memories and disputes. House Petukhin's memorial honors the guards who defended its escape. A launch registration and a witness's account cast that story in a different light.

Inspect ships, habitats and houses on the map to read the stories behind them.

Inner-system voices

The old world government kept a vast slave caste overfed and dependent. Generations of dysgenic decline had left much of the population unable to understand the technology it lived on. A small technical class kept the systems running.

When the arks left, Earth descended into mass violence and starvation. People who knew how to maintain the machinery were hunted, tortured and eaten. Cannibal gangs prey on the remnants. A shelter holds until someone finds a way inside.

Scattered enclaves barricade themselves in. A few defenders still have the skills to use advanced weapons and tactics, but they are badly outnumbered. Their hiding places are being found. Sparse signals reach the belt: pleas for help, warnings about the gangs outside, accounts of what happened to people who opened a door. Often the voice breaks off before it can say where it is.

On the Moon, people remain trapped in sealed shelters. Scrubbers wear out, seals fail and power has to be rationed. The evacuation facilities still stand, but there are too few working craft, too few berths and too little propellant to get everyone out. The shelters ask the belt for repair advice and keep listening to Earth.

A colony on Mars is still answering. Its operators trade maintenance drawings with belt workshops, correct measurements and ask for news. Replies arrive intermittently. Pressure vessels, drive parts and water propellant are in short supply. The colony cannot equip a ship to reach the belt. Contact with the inner worlds is by radio.

The inner-system records preserve survivor testimony, shelter logs and workshop correspondence. Select Earth, the Moon or Mars on the map to read them and listen to the transmissions reaching the belt.

For the families who escaped, Earth remains unfinished business. The houses are building toward an expedition home. First they have to survive long enough to launch it.

Private wakes

Most of the belt's traffic belongs to families and exchange cooperatives, not governments. Their manifests travel between working ports, paying modest local fees. Compact warships reuse pressure tanks, standard mounts and replaceable hull modules; buying a hull is easier than maintaining a trained watch and keeping its yard prepared. Raids threaten that commerce. Patrols and refit crews make survival repeatable.